FILM OF THE WEEK
INTERVIEW | preview: Juan Antonio Bayona’s El orfanato (The Orphanage) |
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| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Wednesday, 10 October 2007 | |
 A still from Juan Antonio Bayona's 'El orfanato' (The Orphanage). Photo (c): Picturehouse, all rights reserved. One of the biggest buzz titles at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was the Spanish genre film El orfanato (The Orphanage), directed by newcomer Juan Antonio Bayona and produced and presented by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. The latter made El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), another genre film that played in Competition in Cannes in 2006 and went on to win three Oscars. El orfanato will try to at least equal that success and if the Cannes buzz is anything to go by, it might even succeed. The film will be released in Spain tomorrow (Thursday) and is the country's submission for the 2008 Foreign Language Oscar category.
El orfanato and Del Toro's El laberinto del fauno seem to have a lot in common, including their Gothic elements, historical Spanish setting and child protagonists. Del Toro has said of the similarities between this film and El laberinto del fauno: "The idea of an internal reality being so strong that it affects the external is pretty much verbatim the same motif that exists in Pan’s Labyrinth. But the thing that I was struck by with in The Orphanage is the fact that all these themes were in the service of emotion". On the surface, El orfanato presents itself as a haunted-house movie. The orphanage of the title is the place where Laura (Belén Rueda from Mar Adentro / The Sea Inside) grew up before she went to live with her ‘new’ parents. She returns to the isolated manor in her late thirties with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and their adopted seven-year-old Simón (Roger Príncep) to revive the orphanage. Simón is a solitary little boy who only seems to have time for his imaginary friends – until he goes missing. Laura fears that something that has happened to her in her own past in the manor might be responsible for her son’s disappearance. Unlike many contemporary thrillers, El orfanato is said to work more with suggestion than with actually showing violence and gore, much like El laberinto del fauno and another Spanish haunted house hit: The Others from Alejandro Amenábar with Nicole Kidman. Bayona’s shorts were very much influenced by US films, though for his feature film, Del Toro has stressed his European sensibility. The director commented: "Whether it is in my short films or in the Orphanage, there is an intended clash between the reality of the world as it is and a reality that I would call a Hollywood reality. I find a certain pleasure in considering myself the protagonist of this conflict, as if I had to permanently fight against the Hollywood style and the weight of the movies that are my references. "The key lies in the manner in which one integrates these references to the story. For example, Carlos, Laura’s husband, accuses her of making a movie in her head… I don’t know if The Orphanage is more or less European in its style, but it represents an intentional effort to not resemble the genre films made nowadays. It resembles more the films I watched when I was a child. In a way, The Orphanage represents my own regression towards these movies I was watching during my childhood". The buzz on the film is even more incredible if one realises that El orfanato is not only the director’s first feature-length project, but also the debut of screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez, director of photography Óscar Faura, film editor Elena Ruiz and composer Fernando Velázquez. If it succeeds in following in Pan's Labyrinth's footsteps and gross over €60 million worldwide without any stars, it will be one of the very few non-English language debut features to have done so. Related links on the web: |
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