The waves of the Spanish coastal Atlantic are as alternately susceptible to crashing in opposition to the rocks and as calmly breaking because the soul of the protagonist of Carla Simón‘s visually luxurious new movie, “Romería.”
Newcomer Llúcia Garcia, in her first main movie position and whom the Spanish director discovered on the road amid a wide-ranging casting name for actors to play an 18-year-old girl at a pivotal non secular flip, turns into the surrogate eyes and ears who embody Simón’s real-life story: Simón’s mother and father died of AIDS when she was a small little one, sending her to northern Catalonia with an uncle. She was left, as a hardly fashioned six-year-old, to cope with little information and fewer reminiscences of her mother and father.
“Romería” finds the “Alcarràs” and “Summer season 1993” filmmaker working behind her most intensely private lens but. The place her household historical past was beforehand abstracted in her prior movies about households fractured by circumstance, Marina (Garcia) is now a stand-in for the director, right here a budding moviemaker herself, who travels to Galicia to persuade the late paternal grandparents she’s by no means met to endorse a scholarship utility to review cinema.
Her father’s household is startled by her resemblance to her late mom, whose personal diaries type the thread that not solely led Marina to tackle a household pilgrimage, but in addition create the Nineteen Eighties-set voiceover narration that contextualizes the movie in 2004. Marina, with a digital camcorder and solely scattered reminiscences, units out to discover the household she didn’t know.
The title, “Romería,” comes from a standard southern Spanish phrase indicating a journey to pay homage to a spiritual shrine or determine. It’s additionally a synonym for a well-liked pageant in Galicia, which is on the northwestern-most level of Spain, protecting the highest tip of Portugal. Who Marina is paying tribute to is left unstated: her father? Her mom? It’s each, however “Romería” is lacking an anchor to lock us into emotionally what precisely she is on the lookout for past help for her film-school ambitions. Marina’s existence was all however worn out from her household’s lineage, her title unmentioned in her father’s dying certificates when he handed within the early Nineties.
Marina’s paternal grandparents refused to acknowledge her father Alfonso’s dying, because the stigma of AIDS on the time was principally wrapped up in homophobia — his dying, it seems, was from needle use amid heroin dependancy, however his mother and father couldn’t and nonetheless gained’t get previous their prejudices.
Marina drifts by means of her pilgrimage, getting acquainted together with her cousins whereas encountering few who match her mental equal when it comes to curiosity. Nor, maybe, her late mom’s temperament, which put her mom at odds in opposition to Alfonso’s mother and father when Marina was a toddler. Marina begins to indicate a few of that, although, as she challenges her father’s household in want of their endorsement. At one level, her grandfather fingers her an enormous envelope of money to fend her off, to get her to cease asking questions; Marina accepts it with some trepidation, because the windfall gained’t reply her inquiries.
Beloved French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (“By no means Hardly ever Generally At all times,” “La Chimera”) captures the surging swell of feelings, and the Galician coast, with typically breath-stopping magnificence. The place Simón’s screenplay can really feel dramatically inert or susceptible to wanderlusting moments that don’t repay or additional embody its heroine’s looking path towards self-understanding within the current through reconciliation with the previous, Louvart’s work right here is bracing; you may really feel the tactility of tanned flesh bathed in seasalt and uncertainty. Louvart movies with an Alexa 35 that makes the sensations and textures of the coast ripple off the display.
There’s a critically nice sequence late within the movie the place Marina hyperlinks up with a cousin, and so they go on a drug-fueled, sensuous journey with darkish penalties. It seems to be a fantasy — I don’t suppose somebody like Marina as headstrong as she is would ever get so carefully combined up with a drug crowd anyway — however it hints at a extra hedonistically alive film across the nook (like one the place, you recognize, she fucks her cousin and goes out of her head on dope, bare in opposition to the ocean rocks, writhing ecstatically amongst seagrass).
Simón and Garcia clearly discovered a particular alchemy, although Marina stays arduous to learn, her feelings solely capable of escape through the reminiscence and even phrases of her mom. (Simón reworked her mom’s personal diaries, which have been truly letters she wrote to mates whereas touring, for the voiceover.) The approaching-of-age autofiction style is a tough one to faucet at a second when these narratives really feel so commonplace at a pageant like Cannes.
“Romería” isn’t with out its personal distinctive form, or visible vitality, or a story sense of joie de vivre, however it doesn’t all the time stand out from the pack whilst Simón deserves credit score for rendering her autobiography in aesthetically elegant phrases. Whereas we depart “Romería” with a way of Simón’s objectives, we simply aren’t as certain of Marina’s. This movie, although, invitations us to ponder the place Marina would possibly go subsequent, and I wouldn’t object to a sequel that explores her later years. We do root for her, however that’s as a result of we’re nonetheless making an attempt to crack into who she is.
Grade: B-
“Romería” premiered on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition. It’s at present looking for U.S. distribution.
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