Comment by kmkm13 on 19 May 2007:

Thanks for the review!!!True masterpiece!!!!Great film !!!!

Comment by rks on 19 May 2007:

Nice review henry. I felt that they could have made the same movie without showing grisly blood and gore scenes.

Comment by henry on 19 May 2007:

Qalandar, just read your review - your knowledge never fails to astound me.

“For we would like to believe that the fascist nightmares of the twentieth century are irremediably past, and Del Toro gives us exactly what we want, albeit with enough subversion to make any satisfaction sit uneasily. Whatever Vidal’s fate, our reaction is tinged with regret at the mode of Ofelia’s happiness, “regret” because her happiness is not for this world, and hence not for us.”

Really loved this last para. The ending is neither sad nor happy. Like the rest of the film, it not provide comfort, cannot be easily explained, but is immensely satisfying

Comment by Qalandar on 19 May 2007:

Re: “The ending is neither sad nor happy. Like the rest of the film, it not provide comfort, cannot be easily explained, but is immensely satisfying”

That line captures the “experience” of this film for me (specifically of the ending) just perfectly.

Comment by henry on 19 May 2007:

Thanks everybody for the kind words.

Comment by satyam on 19 May 2007:

By the way del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron, Innaritu are the best of friends. This last year they made Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men, Babel respectively. All three are Mexican of course.

Comment by satyam on 19 May 2007:

One of my earlier comments on the film:

“On Pan’s Labyrinth I was fascinated to discover the other day that the film abounds in literary references from Andersen to Dickens to Wilde. So for example del Toro mentioned that the scene where the ‘Capitan’ seizes the girl’s hand when first introduced to her (since she’s offered her left one) is tracable to such a moment in David Copperfield.

Also one should revisit Devil’s Backbone as the director insists that Pan is very much a sister film to that earlier one. I did like the film when I first saw it though I don’t think it had anything close to the richness of this latest film in any sense. Nonetheless I do want to revisit it.

Another film than can be seen usefully after Pan’s Labyrinth (I’m sure you have anyway) is Victor Erice’s great (and enormously influential) Spirit of the Beehive. This also starts like a fairytale, also involves a child protagonist, also has the Civil War setting, and is also a ‘tale of cinema’. Of course this has also been available since last Sep on a pristine Criterion transfer.

Getting back to Pan’s Labyrinth del Toro has a nice horizontal wipe in the film when the girl puts her head on her mother’s belly and the we ‘move down’ in a sense and see the fetus and so on. I didn’t think of it as a horizontal wife till the director pointed it out. But I was wondering if you [this was addressed to Goodfella] remembered any horizontal wipes in recent cinema or indeed even in older films. I know there are, I just wasn’t able to think of a specific one off the top of my head.”

Comment by Aditya on 19 May 2007:

marvellous review, henry. great film. its next 2 impossible 2 tell which is a better film between this and ‘the lives of others’. both films tie as the best films of 2006, in my view.

Comment by satyam on 19 May 2007:

By the way Army of Shadows has just released on DVD and it’s a crime to miss this (Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samourai are also available). Here’s Anthony Lane’s review:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/08/060508crci_cinema?printable=true

The arrival of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Army of Shadows” is not a rerelease but a début. The film, though it hails from 1969, has never been distributed here. The title, which refers to the French Resistance, will mean nothing to most people, but for Melville-watchers it has acquired the weight of legend. If they, however, are the only ones who see it now, that will be a waste, since any moviegoers with a weakness for dry heroism, dark-toned humor, and storytelling of pantherish pace and grace—in short, lovers of cinema—should reach for their fedoras, turn up the collars of their coats, and sneak to this picture through a mist of rain.

The scene is instantly set. A column of German troops marches beside the Arc de Triomphe; there is something immediately terrifying in the way that Melville pauses the troops in freeze-frame—as if the cameraman had been interrupted (or killed) in mid-shot, or as if the whole scene were a slice of smuggled newsreel from last week. Up come the words “20 October 1942,” and we see a long, low, black car being driven through a sunless countryside. Welcome to Melvilleland.

Inside the car is Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), a prisoner of the German forces, who is being ferried to a small camp of fellow-undesirables. He stands before the commanding officer, who reads an official description of the new inmate: “Distant and ironic attitude. Suspected of Gaullist ideas.” Two things are crucial here. First, nothing has been proved; suspicion is more potent than hard evidence in the twilit limbo patrolled by Melville’s creatures. Second, the officer does not read out the words; he murmurs them to himself, the first of several characters to retreat into voice-over, and this sense of men as sequestered spirits deepens throughout the film—as does our treasuring of those who, against all odds, insist on brotherly love.

What follows is as inexorable as the beating of a pulse. How Melville renders that fatalism not as a grind but as a source of tremulous suspense is a miracle that I find difficult to explain. Gerbier is transferred to Paris, where he awaits interrogation. Seizing the moment, he escapes and returns to the Resistance network in which he has quietly toiled. There he encounters stalwarts like Jean-François Jardie (Jean-Pierre Cassel), as dapper as a flying ace in his leather jacket, and Le Bison (Christian Barbier), a sort of human menhir. Then, there is Mathilde (Simone Signoret), the bravest of them all. She is middle-aged and drably clothed, with a certainty of will that would not be out of place in a mother superior. Mathilde has one weakness: she carries a photograph of her daughter—a source of possible blackmail—in her handbag. “Don’t keep it with you,” Gerbier says, but she does. So much of “Army of Shadows” is concerned with slips in judgment or curt, momentous gestures of faith. The resisters, with their code of monkish austerity, could almost be members of a closed order. Nobody sabotages a railway line or blows up a munitions dump; all their energy is directed to their own survival, or, occasionally, to the necessary execution of a traitor. (There is a strangulation scene of which Hitchcock would be proud.) Not that “Army of Shadows” truncates, let alone mocks, the myth of the Resistance; Melville himself served in its ranks, and his work is reverent toward its leaders—and toward de Gaulle, who invests one of them, on a fleeting trip to London, with the Croix de Guerre. But your lingering impression is that the underground movement had a symbolic, near-sacred purpose that outweighed the practical, and in that imbalance the movie cuts to the heart of the argument about France’s collective, endlessly troubled memory of the war.

You need not be schooled in that debate to relish the virtues of the tale. All that’s required is a liking for Lino Ventura, who, with his boxer’s nose and his hard-won smile, is the true heir to the humane solidity of Jean Gabin. You must accept that, when Melville clothes the heroes like those of his own gangster movies, such as “Le Samourai,” he is not imposing a style so much as honoring a strain of melancholy toughness—not a bad defense mechanism under such conditions. Above all, you have to feel the plucking of your nerves as Gerbier flees his captors along empty nighttime streets, slows to a walk, and slips into the only shop where the lights still burn. It happens to be a barber’s, so he sits and has a shave, still panting from his exertions, and not knowing whether the man with the razor will help him out or slit his throat. There is no backchat, no music: nothing but the scraping of the blade. For the first, and maybe the only, time this year, you are in the hands of a master, and you follow every cut. ♦

Comment by Aditya on 19 May 2007:

captain vidal has 2 be one of the greatest villians in recent memory. i really reviled this trigger-happy character! he’s sort of naziesque in appearance, and the sheer embodiment of pure evil. what a truly great performance by sergi lopez

Comment by Qalandar on 19 May 2007:

I wasn’t all that impressed by Babel either: the first 30 or so minutes were riveting but after that I must confess to fidgeting in my seat quite a bit…all such “multiple narrative” films run the risk of seeming contrived, but I felt that the nuts and bolts showed in Babel. This is not to say that the film isn’t worth a watch — it most certainly is — and would probably make my 10 best list for the year, but it is not a great film, and certainly not comparable to Pan’s Labyrinth or Lives of Others IMO…

Comment by henry on 19 May 2007:

Satyam, loved reading your comments on Labyrinth. The film is so rich in every sense that it can support such a wide range of readings.

You know one other thing I found was that Mercedes’ character mirrors that of Ophelia in a number of ways. One can even say Mercedes is perhaps the most tragic character here; she too has many difficult tasks to complete, like providing the key to the storeroom to the rebels, but unlike Ofelia, there is no fantasy world to which she can escape.

Comment by satyam on 19 May 2007:

Astute point there Henry. And thanks for the comment..

Comment by rks on 20 May 2007:

Mexican Directors Ink $100M Studio Deal