Campo review – salute to a beekeeping band of brothers

Tiago Hespanha’s Campo is an elegant, ironic pastoral, a documentary depicting aspects in the daily life of an enormous military base in Portugal – and yet humorously or subversively homing in on those things that are unexpectedly bucolic.

There is off-duty birdwatching going on there, also beekeeping, stargazing and even lambing. Hespanha’s camera will discover green fields, dreamy skies, striking cloud formations, and also concentrates on the civilian existence of the soldiers’ families. A teenage boy is shown playing a composition of his own on the piano called Battle in the Stars with some concentration. But then again, straightforward military manoeuvres are also shown, with some soldiers getting yelled at by their sergeant. One soldier is accidentally injured and howls that his father will shoot himself with shame when he finds out.

This is a well-made film, an adroit debunking of militarism, perhaps. But I worried that there is something essentially a little arch and whimsical – and even obtuse – about a film that somehow runs against the grain of what the place is actually all about.

It could be that there is something startling or amusing in finding a bucolic identity in a military camp. But then a real, shooting war might well take place in these peaceful bucolic fields. The mythology of the first world war is founded on precisely such images as these.

Campo is released in the UK on 1 November.