Film review: Camino, directed by Javier Fesser

A sinister Catholic organisation, serious illness and the sweetness of first love: these disparate ingredients make for a potent mix in the exuberant Spanish film Camino.

It’s a shamelessly populist and emotionally manipulative film with a message that only gradually reveals itself. The film’s bitter, angry undertones start off subtly but become strident and even overdone towards the end. If you don’t enjoy sitting in the cinema with tears streaming down your face, it's probably not for you.

The film has garnered a huge slew of awards in Spain, but has fared less well on the international festival circuit. Earlier this year it won six Goyas, Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including best film, best director, best original screenplay, best new actress and best lead actress.

Despite its weaknesses Camino is worth watching for the little-known, sinister world it uncovers and the strong performances.

Camino is a pretty, vibrant 11-year-old growing up in a staunchly Catholic household in Madrid. She attends an all-girl Catholic school and has an obsession with the Virgin Mary and a close, loving relationship with her parents, Gloria and Jose.

Almost from the beginning we see her suffering from sudden, unexplained neck pain, but apart from that things seem rosy enough. The family’s Catholicism bonds its members together and Camino’s vitality seems all of a piece with her immersion in the iconography and rituals of Spanish Catholicism. In one scene she dances joyfully around the house, long hair swinging wildly, as she tells the plumber that her mother’s away on a religious retreat.

But the picture soon darkens. We learn that the family, in particular Gloria, are staunch members of the rigidly prescriptive Catholic lay organisation Opus Dei. Camino’s sister, Nuria, is a celibate who lives in an Opus Dei centre and sees little of her family. And Gloria’s calm acceptance of her daughter’s fear of injections, as the search for the source of her pain begins, starts to seem disturbingly sanguine, even heartless.

Meanwhile, Camino’s hormones are going haywire. She attends a drama group and is lovestruck by the cute boy slated to play Prince Charming in the group’s production of Cinderella. With ironic heavy-handedness his name happens to be Jesus (not unusual in a society as influenced by Catholicism as that of Spain): the spiritual and earthy aspects of Camino’s life seem to be coming together beautifully.

But Camino and her pious mother don’t see drama group the same way. And the shadow of illness is creeping over all her dreams of adolescent bliss with her beloved.

As we grow up, we make use of stories – both those we are given and those we search out ourselves – to help us understand our lives and who we are. Camino must find new stories and characters to explain her emerging sexual feelings and these come into conflict with the characters of Catholic lore she’s grown up with.

The film’s cinematography boldly dramatises the conflict. Compelling, brightly coloured fantasy sequences that suggest magical realism as well as sixties bohemia dramatise Camino’s psychic struggles. But they also reveal a fundamental inability of Catholicism, at least as it is practised in Opus Dei, to deal with the complexities of being human.

These scenes contrast with the dolorous, muted colours of the churchy interiors in which Camino lives much of her life.

The film was inspired by the story of a young Spanish girl, Alexia Gonzalez-Barros, who died in 1985 and is in the process of being beatified (a pretext for eventual sainthood).

It suggests that the memory of Alexia, and others like her, has been sullied by the distortions of Opus Dei’s brand of Catholicism. In the film, Opus Dei’s approach leads to a contempt for human feeling and a preoccupation with suffering as a virtue in itself. (The Spanish priest and creator of Opus Dei, Josemaria Escriva, named the foundational text he wrote for the movement Camino, or The Way).

The anger about this takes a while to make itself known, which neatly echoes Camino’s dawning sexuality and urge to individuate.

Opus Dei controls every aspect of the life of Camino’s family. Nuria has no mind of her own but rejoices in becoming ever more obedient to the demands of her ruthless spiritual supervisor, Ines. In one scene she puts tiny stones in her shoes, illustrating the mortification of the flesh that is still openly practised by Opus Dei members.

The film, then, clearly has its own agenda: to ensure Camino’s essential girlishness and indeed humanity are not neatly incised in the interests of religious propaganda.

At first glance, this means that the central dichotomy can seem simplistic – a bohemian sexual utopia set against the iron repression of the church. Such a sanguine view of human sexuality is itself suspect; Freud, for example, insists that sexuality is always the outcome of psychic conflict.

But I think the film’s more sophisticated than that. Ultimately it manages to collapse the dichotomy altogether in the overarching theme of spirituality. Camino is a young girl of extraordinary spiritual power, and ironically she’s inherited this mystical bent from her religious upbringing. It's this spiritual force that enables her to transfer her childish love for the Virgin to an adoration for the more human Jesus.

And it is the strength of this force that makes Camino’s love for Jesus so ennobling even as she becomes sicker – ironically, its very strength leads the Opus Dei elders, so quick to frame everything within the rubric of piety, to mistake it for religious zeal. But where spirituality is concerned, all love is divine.

Nor does the film let secularism off the hook. A sexuality, and indeed a society that is devoid of spirituality may be just as clueless as Opus Dei: the chaos of the drama group’s performance of Cinderella hints at the dangers of an unalloyed secularism. Camino’s rival for the affections of Jesus in the drama group is an empty-headed young girl who struggles to deal with the world outside of her own concerns.

One of the film’s strengths is the affection and respect with which it treats its adolescent characters. They’re full of vitality, even when acting up, amusing to watch in their gawkiness but never figures of derision.

Camino is played by the luminous Nerea Camacho, who is saccharine without being painfully so. Only gradually do we realise that the Disney-like qualities are deliberate – Camino’s seeming purity and childish innocence make her vulnerable to misrepresentation: the church has a fate in store for Camino that her own heart disputes.

Carme Elias is beautifully controlled as Camino’s mother, Gloria, a seemingly warm woman with a view of suffering – not just her own, but that of her loved ones – as a priceless opportunity to increase sanctity. The lengths she will go to to achieve such sanctity are chilling and also help to embed the film in fairy tale.

Mariano Venancio plays Camino’s more indulgent and less religiously zealous father. At times he is called on to be overly sentimental but otherwise acts with perfect emotional tone.

The shots of the operations Camino undergoes are not for the squeamish. It’s difficult not to see the hospital as just another impersonal institution with no real regard for Camino’s individuality. These shots reminded me of the crucifixion of Jesus and subtly suggested a bloodthirstiness at the heart of religiosity that was extremely disturbing.

The soundtrack is awful, with swelling violins at the first hint of pathos – and therefore all too frequently. This is a shame, because there is a kernel of emotional honesty about the film that deserves a more subtle treatment. I was reminded of The Sea Inside, another Spanish drama, which dealt maturely with suffering and the church in a very different context but was also hindered by a soundtrack that tried to tell the audience when to cry.

Camino is a conventionally plotted film with constant action, although it’s overly long and sags towards the end. But it’s worth hanging around for the denouement: in the end Camino’s humanity wins out in a way that is powerfully touching, despite the orchestral overkill.

Verdict: original in tone and subject matter; often intense and engaging

Camino is playing exclusively in Melbourne at the Nova Cinema.