PAN'S LABYRINTH
Guillermo del Toro opens Cannes Classics: the Pale Man from El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) turns twenty
El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) (2006), Guillermo del Toro’s cult film with Sergi López and Maribel Verdú is being released in a restored version in honor of its twentieth anniversary for Cannes Classics in the filmmaker’s presence. The film tells the tale of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a little girl who creates a fantastical universe to escape Franco’s Spain. The Pale Man’s banquet scene, which has its origin in a church in Guadalajara, is worth a closer look.
Guillermo del Toro has been drawing monsters since childhood, in his school books and in notebooks, which he has kept to this day. His grandmother, a staunch Catholic, tried to perform exorcisms on her grandson twice, worried by his fascination for fantastical creatures. She also inserted bottle caps upside down in his shoes to make his feet bleed, as a way to redeem the original sin. Del Toro uses this eccentric Mexican childhood as raw source material
and El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) draws from its essence. Over a career spanning both commercial movies such as Hellboy and Pacific Rim as well as smaller films, this might be Del Toro’s most personal. In a Master Class given at the Festival Lumière in 2017, Del Toro revealed the origin of his most formidable monster, “The creature from El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) is inspired by a St. Lucy sculpture where the Saint was carrying her own eyes on a plate. She didn’t have any eyes and was bleeding.” I saw this image as a child in a gothic church in Guadalajara and decades later it morphed into the Pale Man.
The scene itself lasts three minutes. There’s an underground room and a long table filled with food that no one touches. Seated at the head of the table is a white creature, immobile with his eyelids closed. Upon closer look, his eyeballs are in his palms. Ofelia draws near, resists, but then succumbs and eats two grapes. That’s all it takes to wake the monster.
Buñuel is the inspiration for the table. In Viridiana (1961), one of Del Toro’s favorite movies, there’s a parody of the Last Supper where beggars gather around a feast. Del Toro plays with the image and produces a fasting monster and a transgressive child, transforming the cruelty of the Franco regime into a tale.
