Pan´s Labyrinth (no plot spoilers, maybe theme spoilers)

This past weekend was pleasant but pretty much unremarkable. One notable thing-- my friend Rachel from OC was in town from Alicante, and we hung out Friday and Saturday nights. Fun but not crazy.
Last night I saw El Laberinto del Fauno at the multiplex in the mall near my house. No subtitles, naturally, which made it a bit tricky at times to keep the thread. Mostly I was very pleased with myself as far as comprehension goes. I had felt very comfortable watching The Departed dubbed into Español (Infiltrados is the title here if you´re curious), but I had already seen that film in english. (Sidenote: surprisingly good dub job-- lips don´t synch of course but in general when an actor´s mouth isn´t moving neither are your eardrums. Very hard to do. Yeah, you lose the Boston accents, but it´s still very fun to watch Markie Mark say "Tu. No. Eres. Un. Puta. Poli." to Leo DiCaprio, and Jack Nicholson´s face is a universal language. End sidenote)
So I enjoyed the film a great deal. The CGI is well done, the young woman who stars as Ofelia is talented, and the direction is near masterful. I´m generally very wary of pictures that boast a "Written, Produced & Directed by X" credit (of course I also really want to be X at some point in my life). In this case, Guillermo del Toro has done right by his script, which itself has very few weaknesses. The interweaving of a fantasy plotline and a war plotline is a delicate thing. Stray too far to one side and the places in which the stories stitch together become painfully, hammeringly overwrought; too far to the other and the stories´ only cohesion is at the level of one character and a common endpoint.
El Laberinto del Fauno treads this narrow bridge over filmic hellfire with great tact and substantial brutality, both physical and emotional. At the script/character level, del Toro builds characters that are sparse but not archetypical, three-dimensional but simple, a choice which works well within the film´s simple presentation of the combat between a group of Maquis guerillas and a fascist cavalry unit tasked with their pursuit in the Spanish countryside in 1944. By contrast, the characters in Ofelia´s fantasy world are wholly, intentionally archetypical, with far less dimension than any of the non-CGI characters. Ofelia´s dedication to the realization of the series of tasks presented her by the titular Faun mirrors her stepfather´s devotion to the quashing of the Republican resistance in the mountains, although their emotional motivations are wildly divergent.
At the visual level, del Toro´s direction serves without distracting. The film has a definite, unified visual style primarily centered around cross-cutting rather than camera movement. Movie´s like this one remind me just how much skill it takes to create good mise-en-scene, and at the same time how much balls it takes to be able to say ¡Ya está!, enough, we´ve got it, Action! The inexorable visual contrast between a leafy, dappled world filled with seemingly hopeless brutality and a dark laberinto no less full of seemingly promising fantasy imagery is the fire in this film´s belly. As the choices of the central characters drive both plotlines forward through their respective worlds, the nature of those worlds leaves the characters increasingly confined by consequence. The stunning nature of the film´s resolution is particularly impressive given the use of a framing device which has cut the feet from under many a decent film. Granted, it is incredibly taxing to follow the dialogue in another language. Nonetheless, were I to watch the film subtitled (and thereby trade the free wandering of my eyes for that of my mind), I believe I would bear no hostility towards the framing structure. I want to elaborate more, but I don´t want to screw up the experience for anybody who hasn´t seen it yet. If you haven´t seen it yet, please do. Be warned, it´s quite bloody-- not so much that you need hipwaders, but know that if slick Scorsesi violence turns your stomach that Pan´s Labyrinth may well have you peeking through your fingers at times.
Overall it is one hell of a good film, and I very much want to see The Lives of Others to try to understand how something could have beaten El Laberinto del Fauno for Best Foreign Feature.