Pan’s Labyrinth

A little while ago I finally saw Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno, 2006) by Guillermo del Torro (Blade, Hellboy), yet another dark fantasy film. I can’t say I know what to make of it... Much Ado about Nothing? It’s set during the Franquist repression in Spain at the end of the Second World War. A woman named Carmen travels with her young daughter Ofelia to her new husband, the Falangist Vidal. To escape her new life with this brutal military stepfather, and to escape the general violence in her war-torn country, Ofelia retreats into a fantasy in which she is a long-lost princess of the Underworld. A Faun in an overgrown labyrinth gives her three assignments to test if she really is the daughter of the King of the Underworld.

It’s true that the girl’s fantasy world (a reversed Platonic Cave allegory, if you will) contrasts poignantly with the horrors of the real world. Her pregnant mother grows increasingly ill. One of the servant maids who took the girl into her care turns out to be an agent of the guerrilla resistance. But other than as contrast with and escape from reality, Ofelia’s fantasy barely interacts with her real life. So the two stories mostly remain separate, neither one of them very compelling... Nor am I sure what to make of the names of the female characters: Carmen (the gypsy factory girl who seduces a soldier, only to fall in love with a bullfighter); Ofelia (Hamlet’s potential bride who met her untimely death)... How far am I to take the significance of their names? And does that mean that the girl’s fantasy is a death wish, suicidal ideation, a mortal hallucination? I can’t make sense of it all...

Hatshepsut

BBC had a documentary recently about Hatshepsut (first half of the fifteenth century BCE), one of the few female Pharaoh’s (not the first, incidentally, as they make it seem). (What’s so fascinating about her, parenthetically, is that she presented herself as a male ruler. Ancient Egyptian also didn’t have a term for female monarch. But that’s not what this documentary is about.) In Hatshepsut’s funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri (across the Nile from Luxor) there are scenes depicting an expedition to the land of Punt. This wondrous, distant land has troubled Egyptologists for ages. Where is Punt? Did the whole expedition happen? Could Egyptians even build ships that navigated the seas? Or is this the stuff of legends that true historians ought to dismiss as fanciful nonsense?

In my classes I would indicate that Hatshepsut was a not a military ruler, she didn’t campaign with Egyptian armies in the Levant (the Middle East) or in Nubia (south of Egypt, in northern Sudan). Instead, she supported trade expeditions – maintaining her position of power as a female sovereign through peaceful means that enriched Egypt (and must have pleased the nobility with luxuries). But “peace sells” only when people are happy, when times are good and enemies are leaving you alone. Hatshepsut could boost her position and the morale of the populations returning from a mysterious land with rich treasures of exotic woods, gold, precious jewels and gems, ebony and ivory, animal hides and ostrich feathers, living animals (giraffes, panthers and cheetahs), and perhaps most importantly of all (at least to the priests of Egypt) live myrrh trees and other marvelous resins for incense.

A few years ago at Mersa Gawasis along the Egyptian Red Sea coast, archaeologists uncovered wooden boxes bearing inscriptions that read “wonderful things of Punt”! They also found coiled ropes and ship timbers. Those finds, combined with the depictions at Deir el-Bahri of the seafaring expedition, allow maritime archeologists to endeavor the nearly unthinkable task of building a replica of an ancient Egyptian ship. Egyptians didn’t use nails or screws, or any kind of metal, to fasten planks, instead they used mortise and tenon joints. Moreover, there is no evidence that Egyptians used pitch, resin, bitumen, or any other product to make ships watertight – in other words, they became watertight because the wood would swell after the ships were launched.

Except when the ship makers are done at the yard ... it leaks terribly ... they wait for the wood to swell ... they wait two weeks ... and after pumping all the water out ... the ship still is not watertight! A traditional method in Egypt, still (and attested in other ancient cultures), is using linen (or other plant fibers) as well as beeswax. Then, finally, after nearly a year of construction, the replica sets sail! They’re on open water for days, everything goes fine, they put the ship to the test, and they are even joined by dolphins (just as the relief scenes depict at Deir el-Bahri)! In short, ancient Egyptian some three thousand five hundred years ago could have sailed down the Red Sea coast to the Horn of Africa.

The Leopard

Recently, when going through boxes from storage, I found back my VHS copy of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963, based on the novel by Tomassi). I have long been an admirer of Italian cinematographer Luchino Visconti (Boccaccio ‘70, The Damned, Death in Venice), yet I haven’t seen this film in maybe fifteen years. So, it was about time I revisited this jewel. It features an incredible international cast including Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon and Terence Hill. Enjoy the rich Technicolor, the luscious lights, the sumptuously saturated colors, the thick shadows, and the overwhelming straw yellow, sand and dust, and the parched earth of the island’s countryside! Marvel at the period detail, the rococo ballrooms, the splendid catholic costumes, the hilarious mustaches! We even view a “déjeuner sur l’herbe (lunch on the grass),” very much like an impressionist painting (well, save Manet’s scandalous female nude).

Set in Sicily during the Risorgimento (19th-century Italian unification), the three-hour historical epic chronicles the decline of the local nobility. When the story begins, an aristocratic family prayer is rudely interrupted as a dead soldier is found in the estate’s garden: Garibaldi’s revolutionary forces have landed in Sicily, in Prince Salina’s backyard! These are times of revolution and resistance ... “brutti tempi” ... On the barricades and in the streets idealistic fervor battles with murderous defiance, tricolor nationalism struggles to overcome parochial loyalties, republican forces fight royalist troops, leopards and lions replaced by jackals and hyenas. The local prince demonstrates persistence in the face of fear and terror ... “Se volgiamo che tutto rimanga com’ è, bisogna che tutto cambi (If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change),” a young hothead idealist proclaims. But soon the Bourbon royal house must flee Sicily and make way for the Savoy Vittorio Emanuele.

The heart of the story revolves around the marriage of Don Tancredi, the hothead idealist nephew of Prince Salinas, with Angelica, the daughter of the local homo novo (“nouveau riche” or upstart, if you prefer), Don Calogero. The wedding symbolizes the new order: the marriage of the old nobility with the newly rich. Meanwhile, we witness the Sicilian aristocrats struggle in languishing anxiety with their uncertain future, with their age-old distrust for Northern Italians. What will happen to the Church in a Republic? Will it lose its riches and its hold over the poor (which it bribes with alms and scares with infernal damnation)? Should the nobility deal with the bourgeois Liberals in order to survive? Can a leopard change its spots to save its skin?

Claudia Cardinale’s first entrance, however, is absolutely phenomenal ... She is for all I know female beauty epitomized! The whole room is dumbfounded in admiring silence ... What a stunningly breathtaking beauty! She is such a seductively sly wench, she could get any man to do exactly as she wishes, have them grovel at her feet in obedient adoration. (And I would be first in line!) What a beauty, Angelica! (And what an appropriate name, for such a devil in disguise!) Just as all present at the traditional first night dinner in the Donnafugata estate, an opulent affair, we gawk at this divine demoness, this evil temptress with her heaving bossom, flirting delightfully with Tancredi! What an undying beauty!

The last forty-five minutes of the movie is one of the most magnificent cinematic experiences you’ve ever had: a lavish, glorious, conspicuous ball to celebrate as if for one last time an age that has passed. An Elegy for Nobility, if you will. It is also Angelica’s beaming debut into aristocratic high society. The prince reasons that all the cousin marriages have been morally degenerating his noble lineage. It’s good, in other words, that new blood is coming into his aristocratic house. But what is really happening is that he is madly lusting after Angelica, despite his upright formality. He keeps telling her how beautiful she is, he’s entirely captivated, thoroughly under her spell. So, he contemplates death and his own mortality. The Age of the Nobility has died – and this angelic vision of sexual desires run rampant embodies a new, modern age that has just begun. Angelica knows exactly how to take advantage with her seductive charm. “Nobody could ever resist your beauty,” the Prince tells her. Amen.