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The original promotion I saw for this film was awful, the impression given of some garish mixture of a little girl battling against fascist stereotypes through the power of her fantasies. I held off from seeing it because it looked as though at best it would be visually arresting but patchy, good moments stretched across an uncomfortable hybrid of styles. Which is annoying, because I thought the two strongest points were how deftly the two aspects of the film were combined (without spelling anything out) and how essential each scene felt to the composition as a whole, nothing felt wasted in adding to the overall tone (though I think it will repay watching again too). I was particularly impressed that the scenes in the real world didn’t leave you impatient to get back to the visual fantasy, and that several scenes were both gripping and a bit too uncomfortable to watch, the way it was constructed to show an inevitable cruelty that was somehow still shocking and upsetting when it arrived.
The idea that this is a cruel world summed it up for me. The film was deeply unpleasant in places, and I’m not sure why the fantasy elements seemed to heighten that, because I actually didn’t find them distressing themselves, but in some ways I think it was because the fantasy didn’t offer a true escape from or have a tangible effect on the real world, but seemed to reflect it in a distorted and yet more truthful fashion.
Just to say it again, Ganesh articulates on the first page, in a great, great couple of posts, how well the imagery ties together and why it’s potent. I originally thought for the first third or so of the film that Ofelia saw her brother as part of the problem, the thing that tied her to this new place and new family unit, and that was reinforced by seeming to remember from somewhere that mandrake root was linked to miscarriage. Looking it up, I can’t find anything that justifies that association, and the rest of the film doesn’t (I think) really make room for there to be a subconscious desire on her part to terminate the child, although there’s definitely a fear or unwillingness to experience the messy, painful, complicated reality of childbirth. That said, these two these two sites suggest that as well as being linked to fertility, mandrake should be avoided or used with caution during pregnancy, so maybe there is something there somewhere.
The wiki on mandrake root also has this quotation:
but all the same it is certain that man came out of the slime of the earth, and his first appearance must have been in the form of a rough sketch. The analogies of nature make this notion necessarily admissible, at least as a possibility. The first men were, in this case, a family of gigantic, sensitive mandragores, animated by the sun, who rooted themselves up from the earth
Put anyone else in mind of the born out of the slime / muck / dirt / blood of the earth faun? I love that you can read the film as being Ofelia’s imaginative response to both the cruelties of her current life and the fear or doubt regarding both her mother’s and her own potential for pregnancy, and how the two seem causally connected in her mind. And I really liked the design of the insects, the leaf wings, and how both their bodies and the body of the faun seemed to be both malleable and under stress, as if they were trying to fit into something that wasn’t entirely comfortable or graceful. Really liked the film overall.
The boxed set nataraja mentions sounds tempting… |
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