22-05-2025
‘Romería' Review: Carla Simón Takes The Scenic Route For A Highly Personal Journey Of Self-Discovery
A textbook example of the difficult follow-up album — or feature film, in this instance — Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón's Romería strains under the weight of her last film Alcarras, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2022, was then invited to 90 more festivals and was as close to a perfect pastorale as any film can claim to be. Drawing on her own Catalan family stories, Alcarras dealt with a family of tenant farmers about to be evicted from the land they have worked for generations. It was a film of sorrow and anger but, above all, a swirl of loving, bickering family life. Along with that film and her 2017 debut, Summer 1993, Romería is grounded in Simón's personal history. This time, she revisits and transforms a trip she took at the age of 17 to Vigo in Galicia, where her father grew up and her parents met.
The year is 2004. Fresh-faced Marina — the fictionalized Simón, played by street-casting discovery Llucia Garcia — arrives in Vigo to meet another dense knot of cousins, aunts and her paternal grandparents. Marina grew up in Barcelona, where her mother returned when she was born. Her father, as far as she knows, died when she was a baby. Her mother died when she was 11. Both parents used heroin, both died of AIDS. Ostensibly, Marina's most pressing goal is to obtain a sworn statement from her grandparents of her paternity, which was never officially recorded, if she is to be able to claim study assistance as an orphan. Blurred with her need to get a piece of paper, however, is something more existential and clearly Simón's real interest: a longing for shared memories. For whatever reason, her father's family has maintained radio silence since she was a child. All Marina knows about her parents' life in Vigo is contained in her mother's old diary.
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The diary is her guidebook. She wants to see the apartment where they lived, the boat they used to take up the coast to Portugal, the beach where she imagines them frolicking naked in the sun, basking in the festive freedom of the post-Franco years. Wearing an old dress of her mother's, she is like Alice venturing into her family's seaside wonderland; whimsical dream sequences show her young parents as if in home movies, the camera jerking and the colors faded unevenly. She shares their fantasy of themselves as romantic rebels. But as she will realize, even a secret diary — 'Don't even think about reading this!' says the front page, scrawled in an exuberantly childish hand — doesn't necessarily tell the truth.
Her own time, by contrast, is shot largely in available light. Interiors are dark against the bright windows, exteriors dazzling. There are secrets here, but it is hard for us to pin down what they are. Perhaps these people have simply forgotten when Marina's father Fon died and what he was like. Or have they? Marina only has to drift to a window to overhear a few of her innumerable relatives muttering about her, what she wants, and when she might be thinking of leaving. As in Alcarras, the real adults in the room often turn out to be the children, who can't see any reason to keep their elders' secrets.
Garcia is a remarkable discovery. Her Marina has a face as mobile as the sea she discovers she loves; one moment childish, the next melancholy with knowing. Like the sea, she is endlessly watchable. By contrast, her brood of uncles and cousins, who confusingly resemble the parallel hippie gang in the 1983 sequences, never acquire definition as individual characters. Only as a group do they coalesce satisfactorily: watching dolphins from the deck of the yacht, gathering to sing filthy bar-room ballads, or hovering around their poisonous matriarch, first encountered on her daybed watching video footage of the wedding of King Carlos. Her generation had its pretensions, however rough the family seems now.
Between these more solid moments, however, is a waft of allusions and trails of information that simply peter out, possibly in a deliberate mirroring of Marina's own frustrations. Much more deliberately structured than the largely improvised Alcarras, it actually feels loose by comparison, its quest narrative never working up momentum. What is strongest, albeit as subtext, is the lived experience of La Movida, where the older generation was confronted with the madness of a younger generation that had cut its ties with Catholic, conservative Spain so severely as to become unknowable.
But this is learned only by inference, while everything else is frayed loose ends. We end the film having learned nothing about Marina's life before she arrived in Vigo, nothing about the adoptive mother who keeps texting, nothing about the various other relatives who died in what appears to have been a scorched-earth experience of substance abuse. Even the reason she's there — that declaration of paternity – is so fudged I had to ask a Spanish colleague afterwards what it was about.
Romería glows with warmth, but so many hints at not very much makes the process of storytelling feel as heavy as wet sand. Simón reaches a kind of point, but she certainly takes the long way round.
Title: Romería Festival: Cannes (Competition)Director/screenwriter: Carla SimónCast: Llúcia Garcia, Tristán Ulloa, Mitch Martin, Sara CasasnovasSales agent: MK2Running time: 1 hr 55 mins
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