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Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
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‘Romería' Review: Carla Simón Dives Deep Into Painful Family History in an Act of Reclamation That's Equal Parts Shimmering and Meandering
Three years after taking top honors in Berlin with her elegiac tribute to the generations of peach farmers in her family, Alcarràs, Carla Simón returns to territory more directly connected to her own past, a companion piece to her debut, Summer 1993. That 2018 film explored a transitional period in the life of a six-year-old girl — a fictionalized version of the director — sent to live with an uncle's family in the Catalonia countryside after losing both her parents to AIDS. Simón's third feature, Romería, centers on another semi-autobiographical stand-in, this time a budding filmmaker fresh out of high school, who travels to meet the family of her late father. Her journey, while essentially planned to complete bureaucratic requirements on a film school scholarship, becomes an exhumation of the parents she was too young to know, their histories veiled in secrecy, shame and the blurry lens of time. That lens is filtered through the curious gaze of accomplished French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Never Rarely Sometimes Always, The Lost Daughter, La Chimera), whose work remains alluring, even when Simón's storytelling risks seeming rudderless. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'The Wave' Review: Sebastián Lelio's Rousing but Elementary Feminist Musical 'Magellan' Review: Gael Garcia Bernal Plays the Famous Explorer in Lav Diaz's Exquisitely Shot Challenge of an Arthouse Epic Cannes: Oliver Laxe's 'Sirat' Sells Wide Internationally While the director has mostly switched here from the nonprofessional cast of Alcarràs to more seasoned actors, she entrusts the central role of her fictional counterpart Marina to impressive discovery Llúcia Garcia, who had no significant prior acting experience and was chosen after an exhaustive casting search. When Marina goes to the records office to get a copy of her father's death certificate for her scholarship paperwork, she finds that it lists no children. To have her name added, she will need to obtain notarized signatures from the paternal grandparents she has never met, on the other side of the country. Armed with her camcorder, she travels in 2004 from Barcelona to the Atlantic coast, where her relatives live, in and around the port city of Vigo in Galicia. That area was also the playground of her birth parents before she was born, and the underlying purpose of Marina's visit is evident in the film's title, the Spanish word for 'pilgrimage.' She is met on arrival by her affable uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa), who turns out to be among her more forthcoming relatives even if his recollections don't always correspond to what she was told as a child. There's also a rowdy bunch of cousins with whom she goes swimming off her uncle's sailing boat, yielding beautiful shots of bodies darting through the water over coral reefs around the Cíes Islands. Marina's video footage of the coastal waters is accompanied by intermittent voiceovers from her mother's journal entries in the mid-'80s, and by chapter headings that can be a bit prosaic. (Those passages were adapted from letters that Simón's mother wrote to friends during her travels.) But while almost every distant relative she meets summons vague memories of her parents, either first-hand or gleaned from others, the timeline of where they lived at various points in the relationship remains vague. There's even some uncertainty about Marina's exact place of birth. Any volunteering of information about her biological mother and father is instantly cut off when she meets her grandparents. Marina's imperious grandmother (Marina Troncoso) is a disagreeable snob, more concerned with getting a mani-pedi or keeping leaves out of her precious swimming pool than getting to know her granddaughter. (This later provokes a fabulously petty act of FU defiance from Marina.) Her grandfather (José Ángel Egido) is ostensibly warmer, though Marina is dismayed to learn that he offered her father, Alfonso, a large sum of money as an incentive to stop seeing her mother. When Marina finds out her parents were using and possibly dealing heroin, her questions become more pointed. She's even more disturbed to learn that the family hid her father away when he got sick, allowing him no visitors. The stigma of drug use and AIDS makes both grandparents prickly when pushed for information about Alfonso. This is especially apparent when her grandfather sits like a Mafia don while nephews, nieces and grandchildren line up to pay their respects. When Marina's turn comes, he hands her an envelope with a fat wad of cash, supposedly to cover her film school expenses but implicitly intended to make her stop asking uncomfortable questions. All this becomes a bit discursive, and frankly, dull — almost like a coastal Carlos Saura family portrait without the politics and without the clean lines and character definition to make the sprawl of relatives especially interesting. There's a hint of flirtation and mutual attraction between Marina and an older cousin, Nuno (mononymous actor Mitch), but that remains more of a tease than a promise. Things get more intriguing when Marina starts interacting with her parents, creating pictures and memories of them in her head. She first encounters them lounging on deck chairs on a terrace in blazing sunlight, like an apparition. By way of an introduction, they tell her, 'You see we're not dead. They just hid us away.' She pictures them wandering naked over rocks on the shoreline, embracing in the sand in a tangle of seaweed or lazing on a boat, watching dolphins. In a departure from Simón's signature naturalistic approach, she drops in a fantasy sequence in which Marina and Nuno drift into a druggy nightclub, where they slide into a cool formation dance routine to Spanish pop. That segues for Marina into images of her parents both sensual and sad, shooting up or strung out in need of a fix. As disturbing as those pictures are, they at least provide Marina with some kind of access to the parents she was too young to remember. (Having Garcia double as Marina's mother and Nuno as her father was a nice touch.) The final developments, specifically the circumstances by which Marina — and not her grandparents — gets to dictate the wording on her father's updated death certificate, are too rushed to be entirely clear. But as the outcome of a journey in which Marina fortifies her connection to two of the most important people in her life, it works well enough. Romería is an elegant, visually poetic film, if slightly less lucid than the director's previous work. But it's an odd fit for the main competition in Cannes; its intimate investigation of family history and mystery likely would have played better in the eclectic Un Certain Regard sidebar. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
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‘Romería' Review: A Budding Filmmaker Pursues Her Parents' Obscured Past in Carla Simón's Lovely, Pensive Coastal Voyage
'Romería' is the Spanish word for pilgrimage, ostensibly a clear and apt title for the third feature by writer-director Carla Simón. Based on travels the filmmaker herself undertook as a teenager to meet an extended family she had never known, this is a kind of road movie by sea, journeying in pursuit of some sense of self-completion. Yet as the film wends its way through the narrow streets, harbors and glittering waters of Spain's salty Galician coastline, immersing itself in chaotic gatherings of family and community, the title's spiritual aspect takes on a rueful irony. There's no holy destination or revelation here, and certainly no warm sense of homecoming — though in finding where she doesn't belong, Simón's fictional alter ego can at last make sense of her own fragmented childhood memories, and those she's retrieved from her late biological parents. After the expansive sociological study of her sophomore feature 'Alcarràs,' winner of the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlinale, Simón's latest sees her returning to the expressly autobiographical territory of her 2017 debut 'Summer 1993.' Once again processing her grief and lingering disorientation in the wake of both her parents' AIDS-related deaths in the early 1990s, the new film is not a direct sequel to 'Summer 1993' — her avatars are differently named and characterized in each — but does gracefully extend its predecessor's depiction of early childhood trauma to the tremulous brink of adulthood. No knowledge of Simón's life or previous work is required, however, to be drawn into this layered, wistfully moving memory piece, which is sure to further boost her rising arthouse profile after premiering in competition at Cannes. More from Variety 'My Father's Shadow' Producer Funmbi Ogunbanwo Headlines Inaugural African Producers Accelerator Program (EXCLUSIVE) Mórbido TV and Screen Capital Unveil Umbra, a Genre-First Streaming Hub for the LatAm Market (EXCLUSIVE) Valeria Golino on Her Chemistry With Matilda De Angelis in Mario Martone's 'Fuori': 'We Were Really Lucky to Fall in Love' We're now in the summer of 2004, and 18-year-old cinephile Marina (Llúcia Garcia) is freshly graduated from high school and preparing to study filmmaking in Barcelona — with the aid of a scholarship for which she's still missing some essential paperwork. Required, for arcane bureaucratic reasons, is a notarized recognition of kinship from her paternal grandparents, who have never acknowledged or communicated with Marina in the years since her father died, leaving her to be raised by adoptive parents. That entails traveling all the way across the country to the city of Vigo on the edge of the Atlantic, where she's met by her genial uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa) and a loud gaggle of cousins, who in turn ferry her to the grandparental home — though not before a languid day's sailing and swimming around the picturesque Cíes Islands, where Marina's parents spent their own youth frolicking. Marina's loose, camcorder-shot video diary of her trip is often laid over narrated extracts from her mother's journal written some 20-odd years before — which detail her ambitions, insecurities and moments of bliss in her itinerant relationship with Alfonso, Marina's father, as they drift around the same shores their daughter is now exploring for the first time. The paralleling of these twin accounts serves, among other things, to show how far Marina's path has diverged from that of the parents who never got to see her grow up: Where they were reckless, restless, increasingly drug-dependent hedonists, she's a quiet observer of life, reserved and straightedge, bemused by the rowdy antics of her oldest cousin Nuno (mononymous actor Mitch) and his cohort. Yet while the family, in all its whirling, garrulous energy, appears outwardly welcoming to the newcomer, Marina soon encounters limits to their acceptance. Her grandmother (Marina Troncoso) is haughty and openly hostile, asking only why it's taken her this long to visit, and while her grandfather (José Ángel Egido) is friendlier, he'd rather pay her off generously than sign any forms legally binding them. Marina's young cousins, meanwhile, ask if she's ill, since they've been told never to touch her blood: The disease that killed her parents remains a source of stigmatized shame in the family, and her presence is a discomfiting reminder of it. Through conversations with various relatives, Marina learns from their conflicting accounts how fundamental facts of her parents' lives have been kept secret from her: Childhood memories are revised in real time, and her sense of self is thrown in flux. As in her previous features, Simón's filmmaking is warmly tactile and attuned to both human movement and geographic texture. Her first collaboration with world cinema super-DP Hélène Louvart feels entirely natural, the camera mobile but breezily unhurried as it weaves through heaving domestic spaces or around the rusted, characterful cityscape of Vigo, drinking in the milky sunlight and long afternoon shadows, but never resorting to postcard compositions. A slight swerve into daydreamy magical realism in the film's second half comes as a surprise from Simón, though it's grounded in purpose, serving as a bridge from Marina's self-shot evocation of her parents' youth to direct, grainy, unprettified flashbacks to days of hanging out, shooting up and making love. Thus do we become privy to sensory flashes outside our protagonist's perspective, from trippy nights on the titles in 1980s punk clubs to a tangle of leathery seaweed and tattooed limbs during one beachside embrace. Simón's sweetly sorrowful ode to lost family imagines what might have been, while acknowledging that not all memories can be passed down between generations — some die deliciously with us. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
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Carla Simón Uncovers a Galician Family's Skeletons in the Semi-Autobiographical ‘Romería'
After winning prizes at Berlin with 'Summer 1993' and 'Alcarrás,' Spanish director Carla Simón is now in the main competition at Cannes with 'Romería,' a deeply personal story about family and memory set in Galicia. The film tells the story of 18-year-old Marina, who travels to the northwest of Spain to meet her biological father's family. The girl's journey is one of discovery, as she has never met her father, who died of AIDS when she was young. More from Variety Kinky Sex, BDSM Alexander Skarsgard and Gimp Masks: 'Pillion' Seduces Cannes With 7-Minute Standing Ovation 'Pillion' Review: Edgy Queer Romance Stars Alexander Skarsgård as a Sexy Biker and Harry Melling as His Budding Submissive Richard Linklater on Trump's Film Tariff Threat: 'That's Not Going to Happen, Right? That Guy Changes His Mind Like 50 Times in One Day' Variety sat down with Simón to discuss the evolving Spanish film landscape, her latest creative choices and the emotional roots of her storytelling. Variety: Spanish films have gained recognition abroad in recent years, especially from new voices. What do you think is fueling this movement? Simón: I believe it's partly generational. A lot of filmmakers are experimenting, taking risks and embracing different directions. There's also a notable rise in female voices and a broader diversity of class backgrounds. People like me, from small villages or middle-class families, have found ways to study film and create work, even outside of formal cinema schools. Producers are trusting this new generation, and that momentum is creating something really special. One particularly striking trend is the number of successful female filmmakers from Catalonia. But in your latest film, you shift from Catalonia to Galicia. Why the change in setting? It's a personal one. My biological father was from Galicia, and my parents' love story began there. The film is about memory and identity, so it made sense to revisit those places. Galicia is a place I've visited many times, always in a kind of research mode. It's spiritually and visually unique, very different from inland Catalonia, and that contrast really helped shape the film. Galicia has a very distinct look and feel. How did that influence your approach to the film's aesthetics? The landscape changed everything. Galicia is green and coastal, whereas the Catalan countryside is more arid and brown. We shot in Vigo, an industrial city near the sea but not facing it directly. That disconnection was fascinating. We also switched from mostly handheld camera work in my previous films to more structured, composed shots here. It reflects the emotional distance Marina has from this family, unlike the intimacy of the other two films. In 'Romería,' the family is clearly upper-middle-class, very different from the rural, working-class families of your earlier work. Why this shift? Again, it's partially based on my real family, but there's a lot of fiction. I met my father's side of the family as an adult, and they were quite different from the world I grew up in. The film explores what it's like to be an outsider in your own family. Marina, the main character, connects most with another outsider, the younger brother. That tension, both emotional and class-based, gave the film a new dynamic. Marina experiments with filmmaking herself, capturing parts of her journey. How did you decide when to use her point-of-view footage versus the film's own lens? Her footage had to feel raw and imperfect; she's still learning. That contrast with the rest of the film was intentional. Her desire to film wasn't in the original script, but it made sense. She's looking for her own voice as a filmmaker. In a way, the story became partly about that process, why people film, what compels them to tell stories. For me, it's my family history that led me to filmmaking. Her mom's diary becomes a central piece of the story. Was that an intentional parallel with Marina's filming? Yes, absolutely. The diary is a generational portrait, it captures how people lived, loved and partied in the '80s. It's based on letters my own mother wrote to friends, which were very intimate. The film draws a parallel between that written account and Marina's visual diary. She's searching for something through her lens, and eventually she starts filming not just empty spaces but her new family too. There's an unreliable narrative element to the story. Everyone remembers things differently, and Marina uncovers contradictions as she goes. How did you approach the story structure? That was key. Memory is subjective; everyone reshapes it. When I researched my own family history, I realized no two accounts ever matched. That inspired the episodic structure of Marina meeting different relatives. Eventually, she understands that the truth might never be fully knowable. So she imagines it. That liberation, creating your own memories to form your identity, is at the heart of the film. You've always worked with large ensembles, but the family in this film feels particularly authentic. What's your rehearsal process like? We cast actors who naturally shared traits with the characters. Then we did extensive improvisations, scenes that wouldn't appear in the film but shaped the family's shared history. We even had the actors who played Marina's parents act out scenes from the '80s to help others understand their dynamic. The goal was to give them real, felt experiences of their roles. We rehearsed in the actual locations to lock in the physical and emotional space. It really comes through on screen. The family feels authentic, with all the unspoken tension and buried emotion. That's the most important part for me, capturing those quiet dynamics, the things that go unsaid. Every look, every silence matters. I'm glad that came through. 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