Culture from the darker side

I admit it, I love movies I can dream in… Pan’s Labyrinth comes close….

In post-Civil War northern Spain in 1944, a 12-year-old girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), moves with her heavily-pregnant mother and stepfather into a new home in the countryside. Her stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López) has been sent to this remote area to rid it of a small Republican militia. Largely ignored by the sadistic Vidal, Ofelia, who revels in ancient stories and fairy tales, discovers an immense and ancient labyrinth guarded by a faun (Doug Jones). He tells her she is the long-lost daughter of Hades, the Greek god of the Underworld, and to regain entry to her kingdom she must carry out three tasks. So Ofelia enters a strange and no less dangerous world of fairies and extraordinary creatures such as the terrifying Pale Man (also played by Doug Jones).

The Visual Effects on the movie are what mesmerized me the most. Del Toro has shown several times that he knows well how to use special effects, and it did not overwhelm the experience. The Faun alone was gorgeous, the sequence in a different “dimension” was simple but effective.

If anything I was a bit disappointed how much of the movie was set in our world instead of the world of the faeries. But at the end of the day the story still makes me want to dream, and I am thankful for movies like these….

4/5

Perfume is based on the novel of the same name by Patrick Süskind.

The story revolves around a strange young man born in 18th Century Paris, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, whose prodigious gift of an incomparable sense of smell and inexplicable lack of a personal scent isolates him from society. Obsessed with the rich sensory world he alone inhabits, his single objective in life becomes the preservation of the perfect scent: the skin of young, beautiful virgins.

The challenge for the movie clearly was how to show scent in a visual medium, which by itself does not possess any scent. According to several sources it seems many directors didn’t believe it could be done, but Tom Tykwker (of Run Lola Run fame) took on the task and….. succeeded.

The movie is long, almost 2 1/2 hours, but one can sympathize, both with the victims and the murderer, with the victims because they do not deserve to die, and with Grenouille, because he is driven by something that he perceives as larger than him. He initially doesn’t try to kill them, but his attempts to save the essence off of a living woman (a prostitute) fails as she considers him weird, so he kills her, and then choses it as the easier / only way to accomplish his goal.

The movie has no winners, everybody loses, even side characters die once they have met him…..

The movie is cruel, but not obviously so, it isn’t crude.

The women are beautiful, though more in a 21st century kind of way, not in a 18th century France kind of way.

I now want to read the book:

5/5

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