The Labyrinth of Fauna (2006) is, for many, the masterpiece of director Guillermo del Toro, the film that best represents his cinema, his passion for fantasy. The success of the film is undeniable: it won several awards, including three Oscars. Highlights: better photography, better artistic direction and better makeup.
The plot puts us in one of the saddest moments in the history of Spain: in 1944, the period immediately after the Spanish Civil War, a time when hunger and misery were havocing in society, a time when it was difficult to imagine, dream or believe in fairy tales.
- International isolation.
- Subjection to a single ideology (fascism) and misery characterize the daily lives of much of the Spanish population.
The Wildlife Labyrinth shows us two stories in one, which will eventually merge. Simultaneous stories happen from the beginning: while a voiceover speaks of a princess who has long lived in an underground kingdom, we are located in Spain, just after the Civil War. Where? Hidden in the mountains, armed groups continue to fight the fascist regime, which is struggling to suffocate them?
In addition, we hear in the background a melody that inspires the purest fantasy and, at the same time, the restless breathing of a suffering girl, this girl is Ophelia, the nexus between the stories.
From the harshest reality, from submission to a regime and from the resistance of weeds, The Labyrinth of Wildlife transports us to the most innocent fantasy of a young woman, to the imagination and ingenuity that many lost after the war.
Del Toro manages to fascinate us with its aesthetics, with its underground world, which, like the world of humans, is also not free of dangers. Fantasy and reality, fairy tales and misery, but above all disobedience; It’s Fauno’s labyrinth.
The name Ophelia immediately reminds us of Shakespeare, Hamlet. Poland, daughter of Polonius and sister of Laetres, is the wife of Prince Hamlet; she loses her mind after the death of her father (mistakenly murdered by Hamlet), and her madness makes her a childish, innocent and tragic character.
His death, never staged, is narrated by Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and is considered one of the most poetic in literature. Ophelia is a woman torn apart by love, tragic for her father’s death.
He is a character who has inspired a multitude of images of romanticism to be a representation of the feminine, innocence, love and death. The story of its ending is magical, it is a fusion with nature; it is not an anguished death, but very serene.
Shakespeare’s Ophelia seems submissive and obedient to the world of men; However, when she loses her mind, this submission begins to disappear and we will see her accompanied by a woman, Queen Gertrude. The image of Ophelia’s death is associated with something mystical, almost fantastic, as if a being from the other world returned to its natural state.
Thus, the choice of name in The Labyrinth of Fauna is no coincidence, but hear that the viewer associates the innocent girl with Shakespeare’s character.
You can also see some similarities between Carmen, Ophelia’s mother, and Queen Gertrude, both, when they become widowed, marry a villain: Carmem with Captain Vidal, a soldier in the service of Francoism who is in a Pyrenean village with the aim of eliminating any hint of the republican guerrillas.
Wildlife Maze society is not fair to women. Carmen represents the values of traditional women, subject to men; Mercedes, the housekeeper in Vidal’s service, assumes a break with these values and, although he seems faithful to the captain, he actually struggles, trying to help the mountain without others knowing.
Similarly, Ofélia lives a parallel story in relation to Mercedes, of which she too will be the protagonist, she will be in charge of bringing prosperity to the underworld.
Del Toro wanted to show patriarchy as a negative thing and, as opposed to it, decided to value the feminine, in the underground kingdom there is no sun, predominates the moon, element full of female connotations for its relationship with menstrual cycle and motherhood. .
Meanwhile, in the human world, the sun will blind the princess by making her forget her past. The sun represents the masculine, acquiring negative connotations.
There is also the figure of mandrake, a plant whose roots resemble a human figure. Ophelia uses mandrake to help her mother in pregnancy, placing her in a milk container, which symbolizes the maternal element.
Captain Vidal will be the great villain of this tale, embodying all the patriarchal values in his person, while Oflia appears in front of this character. Two stories and two worlds: the underground will be the innocence of the girl, the feminine; the real world is hostile, where there is pain and war, which are associated with the masculine.
At the beginning of the practice of agriculture, in the Neolithic period, some tribes such as the Bushmen saw the underworld as a place linked to the transit between life and death, linked to the magical.
Many traditional stories gather accounts of girls who fell into an underworld and ended up having an experience that would make them women. Therefore, there is the loss of innocence and the metamorphosis of the girl.
In this underworld it is common to appear animal figures with human characteristics, trials, temptations and some kind of guide, who is not always someone reliable. These stories have a didactic character, they function as mythologies, which also happens in The Labyrinth of faun.
Wildlife represents pastoral, contact with nature, it functions as a connection between the two worlds, but it is also not a completely reliable character; labyrinth is a kind of search for truth, but also danger.
The tree and blood are associated with life, the pale man represents the power and oppression of the real world, time appears associated with Vidal, always controlling his watch, something that we can connect with the god Cronos.
Number 3 is a constant in the film (the 3 tests of Ophelia, the 3 herds, etc. ) This number represented, in classical mythology, the deity; in the Christian religion we associate it with the nature of God, with the Holy Trinity. In this way, Del Toro builds a perfect and divine universe, as if it were a myth.
As with all myths, there is one lesson: disobedience. Del Toro wanted to realize a reality where there was only one line of thought, a reality in which disobeying becomes a duty. In this way, we have characters like Mercedes, the doctor or the thicket that, despite the oppression, decides to disobey.
Disobedience has two sides: it leads to error when Ophelia falls into the temptation to savor the fruits of the pale table, but to triumph when she succeeds in disobeying the herds.
Characters represent a reality, but are inspired by stereotypes. There are no neutral characters: they are good or bad. Del Toro takes a totally subjective position, is not impartial and is clearly placed next to the resistance, the scrub and all those characters to disobey, also rated the feminine.
At the end of the film, the debate remains open: was Ophelia’s adventure real or simply the fruit of the girl’s imagination?Del Toro clearly states that everything was completely real.
“Obeying obeying, without thinking, is exactly what people like you do, Captain. “The Labyrinth of Bread?