User Reviews

This is a very good Spanish movie but I am worried that many out there will feel lost because many around the world have no idea what the Spanish Civil War was all about or when it was fought. Being a history teacher, I had a big advantage but could easily see how the film could be confusing until you piece together all the pieces. I doubt if this would be a big concern in Spain where this film was made, but for other audiences they may be a bit confused until later in the film.

The movie begins with 12 year-old Carol and her mother returning to her mother's home town. Years have passed and you gather that they are coming to Spain from New York City. Despite the strangeness, Carol speaks reasonably good Spanish and much of the film is about how she adapts. As for why her and her mother are alone, I'll spill it now for those who don't pick up on the fact that Carol's father is fighting in the war on the side of the Republicans (who eventually lost in this very bloody conflict).

The movie gets exceptional marks for its lovely camera work and music. The rather slow and rambling pace isn't bad provided you are someone who can accept films this way. I have seen several other Spanish films about this war and this compares pretty well to them--not better or worse--just a decent slice of life film about those who are left behind as well as a nice coming of age flick.

PS--If you don't know which side is which, the Republicans were mostly Socialists and they were backed by the Soviet Union and Mexico as well as volunteers from many countries (including the USA). The Nationalists were led by Franco and were aided by Portugal and the Fascist states of Germany and Italy.

The prodigal mother returns, at the height of Spanish tensions between the left-wing Popular Front party and the Spanish Nationalists, on a train with her American-born daughter, whose father is fighting alongside the Republican army, as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade(a group of stateside volunteers) in a combined effort to stem the Franco uprising. Against this precarious backdrop, "Viaje de Carol, El" manages to be, above all the riff-raff and intrigue, a coming-of-age film, a somewhat disingenuous one, in this respect: although the film pretends otherwise, the lush photography, the resonant orchestral score, and rational Franco sympathizers, diminishes the meat of the story by obfuscating reality in the name of family-friendly entertainment. The filmmaker can't quite hide the fact that Carol(Clara Lago) is a target, a symbol of everything that the Nationalists despise: entitlement and privilege, two bourgeoisie attributes heightened by her conspicuous American pedigree. A wiser woman would keep a lower profile for the sake of her child's welfare, but the first chance Aurora(Maria Barranco) gets to upset the establishment and their antiquated social mores, she seizes, when the prodigal woman can't stifle her enlightened American ways in code-switching modesty, and lights up a cigarette before a Catholic priest and his charge aboard that same train. When Aurora was last seen around these parts, she had jilted her fiancé(now married to Aurora's sister) after a fling with Carol's father resulted in a scandalous pregnancy. Now the prodigal woman returns: to die, even though a war is on, she'll die on her own terms, regardless of the circumstances. But "Viaje de Carol, El" is complicit in the mother's selfishness. The filmmaker and his cabal of sentimentalist collaborators help Aurora die without leaving her daughter in a lurch by gerrymandering its recapitulated Spanish village with the filmic fallacy that enemy children are absolved from the same enmity shown towards their older brethren.

When the mother dies thirty minutes into the story, the filmmaker's plot against historical veracity begins in earnest, as the sudden passing must first encompass the personal arena of her loved ones and detractors, in concert with the unexplored hypotheticals that Aurora's death entails for all of them. The sudden departure of this continental woman suppresses the drama inherent in the secret discourses of those annihilated hearts that Aurora ravaged with her own careless love. There's no such thing as ancient history when history has a chance to repeat itself. The longer Aurora stays alive, the longer Aurora's old flame(Carol's uncle) has to chafe inwardly over the Yankee love child, the daughter of his rival. On the other hand, if Aurora and her ex-lover resumed their great love affair, Aurora's sister is susceptible of committing an irrational act of passion. In both scenarios, Carol finds herself compromised by Aurora's past. Since the village chief doesn't think twice about shooting Americans, as in one scene where Carol's father flies into town to deliver her daughter a birthday present by parachute, the eventuality of a pointed gun being pointed at Carol increases, as long as the mother, a point of contention, remains alive to remind the agitated parties of the daughter's association with the United States and the aftershock of coitus. Aurora's sexual history has the potential to force the filmmaker's hand into making a film unsuitable to its classicist form. When Carol discovers her mother's lifeless body in the pavilion, all matters of sexual tension is diffused, tragedy quells the boiling blood, paving the way for love's rejuvenation, originally slated for Aurora's potential affair with her sister's husband, to be passed down to Carol in its most elemental articulation: puppy love. "Viaje de Carol, El" repositions Carol in the eyes of the Franco sympathizers as an object of pity, not the object of persisting scorn she'd be in actual wartime Spain, mother or no mother. Now the girl is free to exist in the filmmaker's convolutions with no ramifications of her father's alliance with the Republic. Whereas Carol comes of age without a scratch on her body, Tomiche(Juan Jose Ballesta) acts as her repository, and absorbs the violence handed out by a Spanish Nationalist soldier, for all intents and purposes, should be reserved for Carol, the American(her national otherness is addressed briefly in graffiti, "Yankee go home!" painted in block letters on her grandfather's estate). And Don Amalio, Aurora's father, commits emotional violence against his granddaughter when he sends the young girl to live at the estate of the aforementioned uncle and aunt, still licking their wounds on account of Aurora's liaison with the American pilot. "Viaje de Carol, El" never makes explicit that Don Amalio has some reservations about the girl's consanguinity with the Yank progenitor. This handsome coming-of-age film is slick, but no slick, that we don't notice the gaps.