New York Film Festival Update #7:
Dark and Stormy Closing Night
A look at Pan's Labyrinth and Inland Empire.
By Aaron Hillis
Posted October 16th, 2006, 3:00 P.M. EST
I worry for Guillermo Del Toro and the tough fight the Mexican auteur might have ahead of him in getting Pan's Labyrinth to the wide-reaching American audience he deserves. This magnificent and moving horror-fantasy for adults, which closed out the 44th NYFF this past Sunday night, has already been raking in nearly unanimous acclaim from festivals like Cannes, Toronto and here, still several weeks before it hits U.S. theaters proper in late December. So what's to worry, right? For the uninitiated, it's 1944 and a lonely waif in northern Spain is stuck living with her pregnant mom's new hubby, a fiendish fascist leader. As the rebels plot to invade their fortified compound, the little girl escapes to a gloomy wonderland to complete her own phantasmagoric missions, as assigned by a charming beast who seems neither friend nor foe. Funny that it ends in Labyrinth, though this is far edgier than Bowie glam with Jim Henson animatronics, and summaries are deceiving if you're already thinking of Tim Burton's gothic populism. No, this is a sinister art-house film of uncompromising violence that could scare off older crowds the moment they witness El Capitan repeatedly and explicitly smash a man's face into pulp (one colleague brought up a parallel to Gasper Noé's Irreversible, and he isn't wrong). From another angle, Pan's Labyrinth is a smart, slyly passionate dazzler with nightmarish effects that'll entice Del Toro's Blade II and Hellboy fan base. But will they last once they realize that it's mighty bleak, more-allegorical-melodrama-than-comic-book extravaganza, and has... (gasp!) subtitles? One can only hope that both demographic generalities be damned and my fellow critics have enough weight to steer all breeds of mature moviegoers closer. I have little fresh to add except that I'm not only on the bandwagon, I'm proudly riding shotgun for one of the richest films of 2006.
Nevertheless, my favorite film of the entire festival and the year (thus far) is David Lynch's hotly anticipated Inland Empire, a three-hour magnum opus of such escalating detachment to any sort of summarizable rationality that few have publicly dared to take a stab at what it all means, or had the guts to admit they don't have any theories. I'm speaking especially of a few major voices in the biz who have evaded this by name-checking Buñuel and others as "obvious inspirations." Not every artist cares about or takes from those who came before them, and it's arrogant to allege otherwise.
Pinballing between the id and ego where the heart is only a brain function, Lynch's most challenging work since Eraserhead is a viscerally unrivaled love letter to the transformative powers of cinema that can't be controlled nor comprehended. Parsing that requires some backstory, which begins with Lynch, intrigued by a consumer-grade DV format, shooting test footage of a lengthy confessional monologue performed by one of his regulars, Laura Dern. Over the next two years, scenes were added and interwoven in a piecemeal fashion to flesh out an aloof whole that's truly as calculated as its auteur's greying cowlick.
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