Romería Review: Surfacing the Past

Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón’s Romería opens on the ocean, shot grainily on a lo-def camcorder, with a woman’s voiceover describing the different temperaments of the water. The footage is captured by the film’s protagonist Marina in the year 2004, and the words are from her mother’s 1980s diary – adapted from real-life letters written by the filmmaker’s own mother. Simón’s first feature, 2017’s Summer 1993, explored her experience of losing her parents to AIDS at the age of 6. Romería continues her story in semi-autobiographical form, following Marina’s journey to learn about her biological parents. Strong performances and an engaging blend of real-life and fiction benefit the film, but an odd foray into surrealism and shift in time period undermines this pensive family history.

Marina (Llúcia Garcia) arrives in the coastal city of Vigo to meet her paternal family and secure the paperwork she needs to attend film school. The film finds her on a houseboat crowded with her Uncle Lois, his wife, and their three sons; later, to her grandfather’s shipyard and the dilapidated sailboat her parents called home while they shot up heroin; and finally to her grandparents’ austere house overlooking the water, where her abuelo (José Ángel Egido) offers her an envelope of money to dissuade her from digging into family secrets. 

Any coming-of-age tale hinges on its protagonist, and Marina’s Garcia is fascinating. There’s a duality that comes through in her interactions with new family members: She’s both more mature and more of a naif than her similarly-aged cousins. When Marina’s convincing her cousin Nuno (Mitch Martín) to sneak out with her one night, he asks how they’ll get the keys to his father’s car. “Steal them,” she says, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Garcia’s Marina is unstudied, every emotion flickering across her face without filter, and her performance has a natural physicality – she lights up when compared to her mother and folds in on herself when unsettled. That authenticity extends to the supporting cast, particularly Alberto Gracia as Uncle Iago, the only one to tell Marina the unvarnished truth, and Sara Casasnovas as Aunt Virxinia, whose artlessness mirrors Marina’s as she tells her “I would’ve loved to bring you up.” 

Cinematographer Hélène Louvart brings Marina’s pilgrimage to life, showcasing her vast experience with seaside dramas (La Chimera, The Lost Daughter, Beach Rats). Here she creates a textured and tactile experience of the waves that Marina sees and films, with painterly composition of the blue ocean, dark cliffs, and white-stone town. Similarly, Simón takes us from scene to scene with a steady hand, using expansive, ever-moving shots to highlight family dynamics. 

Unfortunately, Romería’s plot doesn’t always match the strength of its performances and setting. Simón drops crumbs of information for both Marina and the audience throughout the movie, with offhand comments from younger cousins about not touching Marina’s blood and asides from her Uncle Iago about how drugs and AIDS were a “massacre” for her parents’ generation. These deft intimations culminate in a heavy-handed dream sequence set in the 1980s, with Marina and her cousin Nuno playing her parents. Neither Garcia nor Martín can quite sell the sequence, and the ideas it brings up of post-Franco politics and historicity are too abstract to resonate. If only Simón had kept with the earlier, less literal approach to dredging up the past, remaining anchored in the rich microcosm of Marina’s own story.

Romería is now available to stream online.