Romería – first-look review

In her Gold­en Bear-win­ning Alcar­rás, Car­la Simón meets a fam­i­ly stand­ing on the brink of a mon­u­men­tal life change, chron­i­cling the minu­tia of their lives as it begins to morph into some­thing for­eign. In Romería, this change lies in the past, where it remained flim­si­ly buried until the curi­ous hands of young Mari­na (Llú­cia Gar­cia) came to pluck it back to the surface.

The girl, raised by her mother’s fam­i­ly after becom­ing orphaned at a young age, just turned 18, and needs to rec­ti­fy her birth cer­tifi­cate to include her bio­log­i­cal father so she can qual­i­fy for a schol­ar­ship. This bureau­crat­ic chore sees her trav­el alone from bustling Barcelona towards Vigo, a small city nest­ed in the north­west­ern coast, where she is sud­den­ly not only no longer alone but sur­round­ed by dozens of fam­i­ly mem­bers she either has not met or has very lit­tle rec­ol­lec­tion of.

Romería stands for pil­grim­age in Span­ish, and the film is as much of a lit­er­al pil­grim­age in Marina’s long over­due home­com­ing as it is for Simon her­self. The semi­au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal dra­ma is set in 2004, and sees Mari­na try to make sense of this new expan­sive world sud­den­ly engulf­ing her through the low-qual­i­ty lens of a dig­i­tal cam­era. The direc­tor zooms into crooked wood­en alabasters and del­i­cate­ly swing­ing wind chimes, grasp­ing at tex­ture and sound with the vorac­i­ty of those who under­stand the stakes of fad­ed memories.

Like in her two pre­vi­ous fea­tures, Simon is most inter­est­ed in cap­tur­ing the intri­cate fab­ric of famil­ial rela­tion­ships mold­ed by the inti­ma­cy of time and sud­den­ly reworked by life’s tricky, unpre­dictable hands. Sim­i­lar­ly to six-year-old Fri­da in Sum­mer of 1993, Mari­na has to make sense of the invis­i­ble strings con­nect­ing the new peo­ple that come flood­ing into her life as well as thread the for­eign envi­ron­ment that has shaped them into being. Unlike Fri­da, how­ev­er, Mari­na is on the cusp of wom­an­hood and there­fore privy to thornier, more elu­sive human com­plex­i­ties, and this is where Romería finds its anchor­ing emo­tion­al core.

That is because both of Marina’s par­ents have died young, and not of com­pli­ca­tions of hepati­tis like her father’s death cer­tifi­cate claims. The two, who suf­fered from hero­ine addic­tion, con­tract­ed AIDS at the height of the epi­dem­ic. Much of Romería is told through pas­sages of Marina’s mother’s diaries from 1983, the pages at times made map, at oth­ers maze. As the words echo in the teen’s head, lin­ger­ing in the air of the film through a poignant voice over, a real­i­ty long-buried begins to become clear­er and clearer.

The Span­ish direc­tor broach­es the still-present taboo of the virus in a crescen­do. When some of Marina’s many cousins sneak­i­ly roll some joints in the labyrinthine under­world of the fam­i­ly boat, they make sure to ease away each other’s trep­i­da­tions by remark­ing that a lit­tle bit of weed won’t turn them into their par­ents. Then the uncles and aun­ties rumi­nate over lost friends and fam­i­ly, ressus­ci­at­ing the dead through the pow­er of col­lec­tive rec­ol­lec­tion. The young fell like flies back in the 80s, they say, it was either ​“acci­dents, over­dose, or AIDS.”

But, despite a taste of con­fronta­tion when the film leaves the realm of the har­bor and final­ly enters the fam­i­ly home and a brief, some­what tonal­ly mis­guid­ed flash­back, Romería is loy­al to its sense of with­hold­ing almost until the very end. It is then, final­ly, that Simon reach­es the grand apex of her jour­ney of self-reflec­tion, one that holds in the stun­ning clar­i­ty of care­ful­ly cho­sen words a mov­ing encom­pass­ing of how one can only build a stur­dy foun­da­tion for the future after lov­ing­ly repair­ing the unrec­ti­fied cracks of the past.

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