In a culture that tends to favor flashy, look-at-me filmmaking, a director with a gentle touch is sometimes just the breezy caress we need. Spanish writer-director Carla Simón has fashioned a shimmering, affecting fictionalized story from one that she lived firsthand: her parents died of AIDS when she was very young, and she was left in the care of her uncle and his family. What were her birth parents’ lives like? Through filmmaking, she hoped to fill in the missing puzzle pieces.
In Romería, Simón’s third feature, the director’s counterpart is 18-year-old Marina (Llúcia Garcia), who has plans to go to film school in Barcelona. But some bureaucratic red tape holds her back: because her biological parents are no longer living, she needs a signature from her estranged paternal grandparents. Though her adoptive family is loving and supportive, this is a problem they can’t help her with. And so she travels, camcorder in hand (the film is set in the summer of 2004), to the rugged yet idyllic town of Vigo, Galicia, her father’s birthplace, not only to get the signature she needs, but also to reconnect the frayed edges of a family thread that had snapped long ago.
Marina can barely remember her birth parents, heroin addicts who, she’s been told, had both died by the time she was a toddler. Can her grandparents fill in some of the missing parts of their story? And will they accept her at all? The answer to both questions is no. When Marina finally meets these frosty, imperious individuals (played by José Ángel Egido and Marina Troncoso), who express patrician affection for her numerous cousins but refuse to even recognize her as one of their own, she becomes determined to get a better sense of the texture of her parents’ often troubled lives. Their story is a mystery that needs to be brought into the sunlight.
Marina does have allies among her extended family, including a raffish teenage cousin (played, with swaggering charm, by an actor who goes only by the name of Mitch) and a dissolute but extremely sympathetic uncle (Alberto Gracia), who helps her understand the extent to which her father, as he suffered through addiction and a stigmatizing illness, was ostracized by the family. But mostly, this trek through emotionally rocky territory is a solitary mission, and Marina’s navigation of it gives Romería its quiet, restorative power.
Simón was inspired to make the film as she was working on a previous, also autobiographical, feature, 2017’s Summer 1993. Someone had given her letters written by her mother, a gift that made her mother’s voice feel vivid and alive. In Romería, Marina also clings to a relic of the woman who’d brought her into the world, a journal, and returns to the places where her parents lived, to the shoreline off which they sailed, to the boat cabin where they furtively and desperately fed their habit, to the rooftop where, in their glorious, youthful beauty, they sunbathed like deities who thought they’d live forever. The result is a kind of dream memoir, including subtle elements of magic realism, chiefly in the form of a wise and mysterious tiger cat who leads Marina to truths no human can help her find. Romería is a reverie in which the natural world mingles with a mystical one: through Simón’s camera lens, the land- and seascape of Galicia is very real, a panorama of majestic, rocky beaches and sunlight glinting off mischievous waves, and Garcia’s performance has a similar elusive yet grounding power. The film leaves Marina, and us, in a state of grace: sometimes uncovering a truth, no matter how painful the process may be, is the only way to feel the true warmth of the sun—which, on our best days, can feel like the embrace of the parents we’ve lost.
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