Carla Simón’s Intimate Dive Into Family History

Three years after taking prime honors in Berlin along with her elegiac tribute to the generations of peach farmers in her household, Alcarràs, Carla Simón returns to territory extra immediately related to her personal previous, a companion piece to her debut, Summer season 1993. That 2018 movie explored a transitional interval within the lifetime of a six-year-old woman — a fictionalized model of the director — despatched to dwell with an uncle’s household within the Catalonia countryside after shedding each her mother and father to AIDS. Simón’s third characteristic, Romería, facilities on one other semi-autobiographical stand-in, this time a budding filmmaker contemporary out of highschool, who travels to satisfy the household of her late father.

Her journey, whereas basically deliberate to finish bureaucratic necessities on a movie college scholarship, turns into an exhumation of the mother and father she was too younger to know, their histories veiled in secrecy, disgrace and the blurry lens of time. That lens is filtered via the curious gaze of completed French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (By no means Hardly ever Typically All the time, The Misplaced Daughter, La Chimera), whose work stays alluring, even when Simón’s storytelling dangers seeming rudderless.

Whereas the director has largely switched right here from the nonprofessional forged of Alcarràs to extra seasoned actors, she entrusts the central function of her fictional counterpart Marina to spectacular discovery Llúcia Garcia, who had no vital prior performing expertise and was chosen after an exhaustive casting search.

When Marina goes to the data workplace to get a replica of her father’s loss of life certificates for her scholarship paperwork, she finds that it lists no youngsters. To have her title added, she might want to receive notarized signatures from the paternal grandparents she has by no means met, on the opposite aspect of the nation. Armed along with her camcorder, she travels in 2004 from Barcelona to the Atlantic coast, the place her kinfolk dwell, in and across the port metropolis of Vigo in Galicia.

That space was additionally the playground of her beginning mother and father earlier than she was born, and the underlying objective of Marina’s go to is clear within the movie’s title, the Spanish phrase for “pilgrimage.”

She is met on arrival by her affable uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa), who seems to be amongst her extra forthcoming kinfolk even when his recollections don’t all the time correspond to what she was instructed as a baby. There’s additionally a rowdy bunch of cousins with whom she goes swimming off her uncle’s crusing boat, yielding stunning pictures of our bodies darting via the water over coral reefs across the Cíes Islands.

Marina’s video footage of the coastal waters is accompanied by intermittent voiceovers from her mom’s journal entries within the mid-‘80s, and by chapter headings that may be a bit prosaic. (These passages have been tailored from letters that Simón’s mom wrote to mates throughout her travels.) However whereas virtually each distant relative she meets summons obscure recollections of her mother and father, both first-hand or gleaned from others, the timeline of the place they lived at numerous factors within the relationship stays obscure. There’s even some uncertainty about Marina’s precise native land.

Any volunteering of details about her organic mom and father is immediately reduce off when she meets her grandparents. Marina’s imperious grandmother (Marina Troncoso) is a unpleasant snob, extra involved with getting a mani-pedi or preserving leaves out of her valuable swimming pool than attending to know her granddaughter. (This later provokes a fabulously petty act of FU defiance from Marina.)

Her grandfather (José Ángel Egido) is ostensibly hotter, although Marina is dismayed to study that he provided her father, Alfonso, a big sum of cash as an incentive to cease seeing her mom. When Marina finds out her mother and father have been utilizing and probably dealing heroin, her questions change into extra pointed. She’s much more disturbed to study that the household hid her father away when he received sick, permitting him no guests.

The stigma of drug use and AIDS makes each grandparents prickly when pushed for details about Alfonso. That is particularly obvious when her grandfather sits like a Mafia don whereas nephews, nieces and grandchildren line as much as pay their respects. When Marina’s flip comes, he fingers her an envelope with a fats wad of money, supposedly to cowl her movie college bills however implicitly meant to make her cease asking uncomfortable questions.

All this turns into a bit discursive, and admittedly, uninteresting — virtually like a coastal Carlos Saura household portrait with out the politics and with out the clear traces and character definition to make the sprawl of kinfolk particularly attention-grabbing. There’s a touch of flirtation and mutual attraction between Marina and an older cousin, Nuno (mononymous actor Mitch), however that continues to be extra of a tease than a promise.

Issues get extra intriguing when Marina begins interacting along with her mother and father, creating photos and recollections of them in her head. She first encounters them lounging on deck chairs on a terrace in blazing daylight, like an apparition. By the use of an introduction, they inform her, “You see we’re not lifeless. They simply hid us away.” She photos them wandering bare over rocks on the shoreline, embracing within the sand in a tangle of seaweed or lazing on a ship, watching dolphins.

In a departure from Simón’s signature naturalistic strategy, she drops in a fantasy sequence wherein Marina and Nuno drift right into a druggy nightclub, the place they slide right into a cool formation dance routine to Spanish pop. That segues for Marina into photographs of her mother and father each sensual and unhappy, taking pictures up or strung out in want of a repair. As disturbing as these photos are, they at the very least present Marina with some form of entry to the mother and father she was too younger to recollect. (Having Garcia double as Marina’s mom and Nuno as her father was a pleasant contact.)

The ultimate developments, particularly the circumstances by which Marina — and never her grandparents — will get to dictate the wording on her father’s up to date loss of life certificates, are too rushed to be completely clear. However as the result of a journey wherein Marina fortifies her connection to 2 of crucial individuals in her life, it really works nicely sufficient.

Romería is a chic, visually poetic movie, if barely much less lucid than the director’s earlier work. However it’s an odd match for the principle competitors in Cannes; its intimate investigation of household historical past and thriller probably would have performed higher within the eclectic Un Sure Regard sidebar.