This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Drama, Fantasy Adventure, Foreign Language, P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Director: Guillermo DelTorro
Starring: Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu, Doug Jones, Alex Angula
This is a relentlessly dark, but wonderful fairy tale, as well as an example of truly fine filmmaking as evidenced by its three academy awards in this area. The story is very good and the actors are all excellent. I see few foreign language films and recommend fewer still, but this is one gets my highest rating. Even if you usually don’t care for foreign language features, this one is worth a look.
The movie is set in Fascist Spain in 1944 and Ivana Baquero is a young girl named Ofelia who travels with her mother (Ariadna Gil) to join her new husband (Lopez) at a mountain army camp where he is the evil Captain of a unit chasing rebels. Once there Ofelia soon finds herself in contact with strange, mysterious beings, including the Faun, who claims that she is a long lost princess of a subterranean world, but can he be trusted?
So often we forget that quality movies are not found only on our side of the pond. This is a dark, beautiful story and an old-fashioned fairy tale in the traditional of the original Grimm’s stories. Unless you are fluent in Spanish, you will need the subtitles. This is a pain in the ass, I know, but this one is worth it.
