SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB: WEEK 111: Pan's Labyrinth

I guess I don’t know much about Spain’s climate following the Civil War, so your points about the mother latching on to Vidal to avoid a life of poverty and woe would make sense.

Do you think the mom was then using Vidal for the security for her and her daughter, or do you think she genuinely loved the dude? Maybe both?

He didn't strike me as that lovable so I would think security for herself and her child was her main motivation. I seem to remember that she took over her husband's tailoring, and that she continued to work on Vidal's clothing and that was how they got started. Even having a source of income, she would have had a tenuous existence. The possibility that he did kill the husband is interesting to me. And I guess maybe he was charming and seduced her and then turned into a prick....that happens too. I just don't feel she probably had many options :(
 
Here is the thing, if we assume the fairy tale portion of the story is in Ofelia's head then we have to also assume its not just imagination because she sees the characters, she hallucinates the characters, as we saw at the end when she saw Fauno but Vidal didn't. That would classify her as a little girl suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Do you want to believe she was schizophrenic or that she was having a supernatural experience?

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I guess I want to believe her imagination is magic.


On the other hand, the chalk that lets her create doors really did exist and really did get her from the attic to Vidal's quarters. del Toro said that was one of the objective clues he left that the pother world was real. I probably should be listening to that guy, he seems like he knows a lot about the movie.

Also, did anyone notice that the fireplace in the Pale Man's lair is shaped like the head of a toad with its mouth open?

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I love this kind of attention to detail. And look at all the gluttony... a consistent theme throughout.
 
On the other hand, the chalk that lets her create doors really did exist and really did get her from the attic to Vidal's quarters. del Toro said that was one of the objective clues he left that the pother world was real. I probably should be listening to that guy, he seems like he knows a lot about the movie.

If Del Toro intends for the magic kingdom to be real then we have to look at the following detail.

I love this kind of attention to detail. And look at all the gluttony... a consistent theme throughout.

Ofelia had just fought the Toad then the Toad's head appears as the fireplace in the Pale Man's lair. If everything is real then I can only conclude that the Pale Man is connected to the Toad in some way or even sent him. How else would his fireplace miraculously be shaped like the monster Ofelia just fought?
 
It most definitely was her imagination

Imagination doesn't make one hallucinate. She actually saw and spoke to the characters and they spoke to her. We saw that when she was talking to Fauno but Vidal couldn't see him. That isn't imagination, that's mental illness and it makes an already dark fairy tale ever darker.
 
Personally, the fact there was no way for Ofelia to escape her locked room without the magical chalk is still the overriding factor. (not to mention Del Toro's personal statements, as sickc0d3r mentioned, he seems to know what he's talking about):D
 
For most of the time I was watching the movie I wasn't too much about if the fantasy was real or not, just kind of taking it as ambiguous, but at the end there were three things that changed my mind. First was the Captain not seeing or hearing the faun. Next was the queen of the underworld being played by the same woman as Ofelia's mother. Lastly was how we saw Ofelia's vision of reuniting with her family just before she dies, not after she died. I think her imagination was reacting to her surroundings and situation as they changed. For example, earlier when she failed the second trial the faun basically told her she had lost her chance forever, but after her mother died and she was locked up he showed up again and said she actually would get a second chance. This along with her seeing her parents before dying make me think she was becoming more detached with reality as she retreated further into her own imagination. This new interpretation of mine led to me being really devastated by the ending, especially because I had remembered it as a happy ending, so I felt the rug was pulled out from under my feet so to speak.

So the queen at the end was her biological mother! That to me cements it. If it was true, the queen would have been a different person. This makes me :( and now I need some tissues!
 
I must ask, why, oh why didn't Mercedes finish dispatching El Capitan when she had the chance? Ofelia's death is on her hands, dammit.

Annoying shit that happens in movies. If I am ever in a situation where I'm being attacked, I will NOT just wack the dude on the head and assume he is incapacitated! Same thing with the opium or whatever drug Ofelia gave him. I guess there would be less of a movie if he would have stayed down in both those cases.
 
Dude, RoboCop is my favorite action film of all time. Highlander is great too, but I’ve only seen it 2-3 times, whereas I couldn’t count how many times I’ve seen RoboCop.

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Had the baby turned out female he would probably just have done what Caligula did and make a legal decree saying that the child was male anyways.

When I first watched it, I was scared (almost sure) that would be the case. It was a relief that he was a boy as I was afraid of what he would do....
 
The thing about Vidal is he felt he lived in his fathers shadow and on some level hated his father, and as a byproduct, hated himself, which is why he mimicked slashing his own throat when he looked at the broken watch. Remember, that broken watch was his father's and his father broke it at the moment of his death to tell his son Vidal how a real man dies. Vidal, as a consequence never felt he could measure up to that sort of thing. He tried to at the end but then got deleted.

This attitude definitely drove everything he did, like when he rushed in to attack the rebels. He had not fear and seemed to be driven by this belief that he was indestructible.... right up until the end, that is <45>
 
If Del Toro intends for the magic kingdom to be real then we have to look at the following detail.



Ofelia had just fought the Toad then the Toad's head appears as the fireplace in the Pale Man's lair. If everything is real then I can only conclude that the Pale Man is connected to the Toad in some way or even sent him. How else would his fireplace miraculously be shaped like the monster Ofelia just fought?
I would say of course they're connected. Ofelia is given tasks to perform and I assume they are all related. She faces the monsters that prevent her from returning to her father (or something like that), and her human world life mirrors that world with physical and institutional representations of the same monsters.

Besides, the fact that such a world even exists means magic is afoot. Any miraculous occurrence is probably part of the magic.
 
So the queen at the end was her biological mother! That to me cements it. If it was true, the queen would have been a different person. This makes me :( and now I need some tissues!
Yes her name is Ariadna Gil. She's credited in the film as Carmen / Queen of the Underworld

Here she is as the mother just in case anyone forgot what she looked liked

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Here she is as the Queen. Her hair is blonde so maybe that is why you didn't notice.

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And here's a nice picture of the cast members together

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I had sort of the same thing happen to me. First time I saw this, I took all of the fantasy stuff at face value, and accepted that she was on some private mythical journey that she conquers. The second time I was seeing it as her fabricating it all to cope with her miserable situation. I found the story to be better this with this newfound discovery, but obviously I must have still liked it enough with my first interpretation of the film that I would even want to watch it a second time.

Do we think this may be coz we are all older?
 
Annoying shit that happens in movies. If I am ever in a situation where I'm being attacked, I will NOT just wack the dude on the head and assume he is incapacitated! Same thing with the opium or whatever drug Ofelia gave him. I guess there would be less of a movie if he would have stayed down in both those cases.
At least there should have been some reason for her to leave the job unfinished (like an interruption or something). It would have been less frustrating than her purposely letting him live and telling him not to hurt the girl.

I guess I am captain obvious on that one, and going back and reading the thread I see I was way late to the party.
 
At least there should have been some reason for her to leave the job unfinished (like an interruption or something). It would have been less frustrating than her purposely letting him live and telling him not to hurt the girl.

I hate that kind of writing. Same as with whatever she drugged him with. There was all this tension over it and then he basically just walks it off. :rolleyes:

th
 
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