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| Category: | Movies | | Genre: | Foreign |
I had heard good things about this movie and when I suggested it, MarcL also said that he'd seen the preview last year and had made up his mind since then. So off we went along with Jits + friend J, Nat, bro, Poi, Xian. Since we were coming from Winterlicious, we decided on the cinema at Bay-Bloor. It's not a very new venue and I had to agree with MarcL about the seats not being very tiered, but nonetheless, the location was great and Indigo was just downstairs, which made for good pre-show time-wasting.
So, about the movie. It was billed as an 'adult fairytale', so MarcL and I were expecting grown-up themes in a fairytale setting....but we were wrong.
The movie is set at the end of WW2 and is about Ofelia, a young girl who journeys with her widowed mother to a military outpost by the edge of Spain's mountains. Her mother had just married the Captain of the regiment, and was carrying his child to be born at the outpost.
When they arrive, Ofelia finds that all is not well. The Captain is cold and hard-fisted, and the regiment is fighting guerillas who camp out in the hills. But then a fairy leads her to the stone labyrinth next to the main building where the family stays....and she meets a faun who tells her she might possess the soul of the long-lost princess of the Underworld. But to be sure she is the real thing, she has to perform 3 tasks....
Well, it sounds like a setup for a fairytale right? That's what I understood too, but in actual fact, the fairytale part itself is all innocent as fairytales should be. It's the real-life parts that give the film its 'adult rating' -- GP saw it a few days earlier and told me that there were some sadistic parts, and he wasn't kidding.
The violence starts when the movie examines the war and its consequences -- which is about 50% of the film. War is an ugly thing and when someone as rigid and proud as the Captain is in charge, things get so much worse. As Ofelia struggles with her tasks and her worry for her mother, who's undergoing a difficult pregnancy, the guerillas struggle with opposing the Captain, who in turn vows to strike harder each time the guerillas attack.
Violence aside, it was a well-done movie. The graphics were vivid and the music was fitting -- mostly sad but with a touch of fantasy. Jits and MarcL liked how the events in both the 'worlds' parallel each other, and bro thought that the Captain was actually a well-written character in that he was flawed in many ways, but still humanly so. It was a pretty long movie (more than 2 hours) but I was on the edge of my seat all the time.
Still...I wouldn't watch it again -- too much realistic violence, heh.
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