Entries tagged with “Guillermo del Toro”

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The Orphanage has one indelible image, and that's plenty. It also has a sly current of grief and healing that hits home mostly on reflection, after cold recognitions and resonances sink in.

Directed by Spaniard J.A. Bayona and written by Sergio G. Sánchez, The Orphanage arrived in the United States under the banner of producer Guillermo del Toro, and it suffers from the expectations that name carries. Del Toro's Spanish-language films are compact, textured, and rich with meaning. Cronos (1993) is an alluring, lethal metaphor-dispensing machine, while Pan's Labyrinth (2006) has the ageless authenticity of a folk tale, among its many other merits. The Devil's Backbone (2001) most closely resembles The Orphanage in his oeuvre, but with so much attention paid to milieu — physical, social, historical — it transcends its obvious genre; its spectral elements become nearly secondary.

Bayona's movie is merely a good ghost story, which is no small thing, but it ain't Guillermo del Toro. While the acclaimed Mexican writer/director is fundamentally a symbolist, The Orphanage approaches its story through the emotional prism of its lead character.

In a previous entry, I noted the disconnect between Guillermo del Toro's assertion that Pan's Labyrinth is "not about sexual identity" and the movie's marketing materials and design.

In this short audio commentary (part of Culture Snob's Five Minutes series), we look at the toad scene in the movie to undercut the writer-director's claim even more. Pan's Labyrinth is very much about sexual identity, particularly a woman's reproductive power over a man.

As much as I've wanted to write about Pan's Labyrinth, it hasn't happened, so you'll have to wait until its DVD release for a proper essay. (I have lots of ideas, but the movie's details have faded so much that anything I write would be either too vague or filled with errors. Even more than normal.)

For now, I'll note that I was struck by something writer-director Guillermo del Toro said in an interview:

Question: "So often in fairy-tale analysis, there's a tendency to read any story of a young girl as a psychosexual parable, but this film specifically doesn't go that way."

Answer: "Not at all. I consciously avoided it, not out of prudishness — though I probably am prudish — but out of the same reason why I tried to avoid the myth of vampirism in Cronos through using the most completely unerotic window I could; I tried to approach it like an addiction. In Pan's Labyrinth, I knew that the psychosexual angle was really tired; it felt very 1980s for me, and I felt this was a movie about a girl who was on the threshold of making a choice, where she could cease to be a girl, but it was not about sexual identity."

Perhaps he should have told that to the movie's designers and marketers. Take a look at these images and say with a straight face that they don't bear a striking resemblance to female genitalia.

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