Doll of Faith – Weekend – Kommersant

Pinocchio Guillermo del Toro is out on Netflix. After numerous adaptations of Collodi’s fairy tale, especially after recent versions by Matteo Garrone and Robert Zemeckis, the desire to return to Pinocchio looks at least strange, if not presumptuous. But del Toro in 2022 turns the fabulous into the political and poses the most uncomfortable questions.

Text: Zinaida Pronchenko

At the beginning of January, Guillermo del Toro predicted with the “Alley of Nightmares”, a gloomy phantasmagoria that compared almost head-on “freaks” and people not in favor of the latter, everything that would happen to us in the fateful 2022: the world would become like a dark tunnel, a black-black room no hope. The action of Nightmare Alley was set in the era of the Great Depression, the main character Stanton Carlisle, in order to escape from poverty, as well as from the ghosts of the past, joined the troupe of artists of a traveling circus, learned to call spirits, earned a lot of money on this, but in the final, as usual and it happens when you build everything on a lie, you find yourself plunged into the abyss of darkness and turn into a beast yourself. After all, only a beast is able to live by instincts alone, not distinguishing good from evil, not caring about the soul, not carrying anything in its heart.

“Pinocchio” starts with a short and heartbreaking flashback: during the First World War, the old man Geppetto is raising his son Carlo, a wonderful boy with eyes like two ripe cherries, obedient to his caring father in everything. It would seem that nothing can destroy this pastoral, this small world full of uncompromising love. But in the big world, another absurd war begins, and Carlo dies under the rubble of the village church, where Geppetto was restoring a wooden crucifix. Many years later, on the eve of a new, even more bloody war, the inconsolable Geppetto, in a moment of despair, makes a doll from a log … further, as they say, history – or rather, the history of art.

Already from the scene of Carlo’s death alone, del Toro’s ambitions become clear – to film the textbook text contrary to the established moralizing tradition. His “Pinocchio” is devoid of any didactics for children and youth, in which even adults at a moment of weakness can catch a hint: that one should not lie and be lazy, but one must study diligently and carefully listen to elders. Before the bomb falls on the church, Carlo hesitates and looks into the eyes of Christ for a long time. And these are empty eyes, indifferently looking at an innocent child, and at the whole world, doomed to endless suffering. Because there is no god. Because God is the biggest lie of mankind. In this sense, Pinocchio, of course, is perceived as a sequel to Nightmare Alley, or even as a kind of intermediate result, a kind of summary of the director’s entire filmography. The fairy-tale form that del Toro gravitates towards—whether he shoots film noir, horror, or romantic melodrama—he needs it not to give exhaustive and comfortable answers, but to ask unnecessary, extremely uncomfortable questions. So, Pinocchio, who looks a lot like Frankenstein, having already been ostracized by respectable fellow citizens, looking at the same crucifix that Geppetto is repairing again, thinks aloud: why do they love him and do not love me, because he is also made of wood?

From the tree, as it turns out, not only the symbol of faith is made, but almost everything around. Including faith itself. In the twentieth century, it, alas, became synonymous with hatred, or, well, the last, purely speculative argument in favor of crimes. Why, del Toro asks, do people believe in evil, while calling evil good? Why does love for one’s homeland always mean hatred for someone else’s homeland? Why is it necessary to kill in the name of love? Why love most often requires submission, and not equality, why should it provoke discord, and not create a community? Why does a god crucified on a cross want those for whom he died in terrible agony to suffer in response? What is this faith in which an eye must be given for an eye? And why has this injustice been avoided from time immemorial to be called into question, if even a wooden doll has an obvious answer? Because monsters are not what they seem. True horror is created just by people, or rather, monsters in the shell of people.

Of course, “Pinocchio” in the version of del Toro can be annoying, especially today. Again, the viewer will say, they talk to us about the War, again even the fabulous is political, as if the personal is not enough. Again, in the frame, from the touch of a fairy (in del Toro she looks like a sphinx and talks about the hardships of immortality and the meaning of life in the rhetoric of Schopenhauer with Nietzsche), it is full of gunpowder, not magic. Why turn a children’s fairy tale, transparent in its message, like a mountain stream, into a muddy river of time? For that matter, of all rivers, we prefer the one that brings oblivion – so we feel eternal, like Pinocchio, with the right to repeat again and again all the same monstrous mistakes. But repetition is not the mother of learning. It is no coincidence that Pinocchio comes out at the end of 2022, which proved that repetition is the sister of a crime, such as war.

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