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“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.
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.
English (US) ·