Based on her own teenage journey to Galicia to discover her long-deceased biological parents’ secret lives, Spanish director Carla Simón offers a sensitive portrait of a dysfunctional family bursting at the seams because of the internal schisms brought about by the clash between conservative elders and their traumatized offspring. Despite being slightly weighed down by a stylistically jarring third act, Romeria remains a gripping watch throughout, with Simón lacing with narrative with delicate gestures and minute design details that help the viewer establish their bearings about the characters and the parallel timelines.
Bowing in competition in Cannes, Romeria could be seen as Simón’s attempt to amalgamate the autobiographical touch of her first feature Summer 1993 (which revolves around a girl’s struggle to adapt to life with her new life in the countryside after the death of her mother) and the cutting critique of capitalism underlining her Berlinale prize-winner Alcarràs (in which a family’s attempt to survive the demise of their farm). With this third feature, Simón manages to subtly tease the historical and political out of the personal, as she looks back on how the social norms of the past maintain their hold over Spaniards of different generations, even in an era when the country is nominally free.
In Spanish, “romería” refers to a religious pilgrimage. And that’s what Marina (Llúcia Garcia) embarks on, an aspiring filmmaker returning to her father’s Galician hometown Vigo to get some paperwork for her application for a scholarship in film school in the summer of 2004. Somehow, she discovers her father – and thus herself – doesn’t exist in law, as their names aren’t somehow left out in the family documents in the civil registry.
As what should have been a mundane administrative process turns tricky, the visit to her father’s family becomes a deep dive into a family saga. While the first encounter with the seemingly well-off and mild-mannered uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa) and his family is warm and convivial, the meeting with the clan is awkward from the start. “The family are here,” Lois says with barely disguised disdain, as his siblings put on a pompous welcoming-party-on-sea for their long-estranged niece.
As Marina gets to converse with each of her uncles and aunts, she gradually realises the bad blood flowing between them, while learning bits and pieces about the way her father was treated when he was terminally ill. Through the loose talk from his cousins – specifically Lois’ eldest son Nuno (Mitch), with whom Marina becomes increasingly close – she learns of how his father Alfonso (or “Fon”, as Marina always refers him to) was hidden away from public view, ostracised by even his own kin for the supposedly shameful disease he was suffering from.
Marina eventually understands the source of anguish which made her aunts and uncle such idiosyncratic, damaged souls. Arriving at the family home, she meets her paternal grandmother, a mean, royalty-obsessed hypochondriac with ne’er a good word said for anyone (“Your kids are wild,” she says to Lois’ wife, as she then struts to the swimming pool in her high-heels to chastise her grandchildren for not showering before jumping in). Her grandfather, meanwhile, is a reactionary who claims that if modern Spain “disappeared, the world will be a better place”; he presides over a ritual in which the young ones have to line up to greet him, after which he will bestow them a 50-euro note as reward.
Rather than peeling a single bill for Marina, the grandfather shoves her a thick envelope, telling her this will be enough for her studies – a thinly-veiled gesture signifying his refusal to change those official documents and return Fon’s (and Marina’s) name to the family fold. Seething with fury, Marina eventually casts her reverence aside, sparking her own rebellion against la familia and leading to an epiphany about her parents’ spiraling lives towards doom and departure.
In Romeria, Simón drives her story forward on many different levels at once. Apart from the main narrative – filmed dynamically by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, whose work is also present at Cannes in her lensing of Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great – Simón also uses video footage supposedly recorded by Marina, and also a voiceover reading her mother’s diary entries about her blissful life in Galicia. Those glowing recollections of good times are quickly thrown into question in the film’s fantastical centrepiece, as Simón ditches her trademark realism and delivers a delirious reconstruction of the troubled lives of Marina’s papa and mama amidst a drug-addled haze.
Despite its eye-catching imagery, the sequence overloads the film with information that should better be left to the viewer’s imagination – after all, Romeria is shaped somewhat as a prodigal granddaughter’s investigation of a family secret, and the truth is best left to be revealed through Simón’s delicate niceties and slow-burning revelations. Then again, this is perhaps the director’s attempt to confront her personal demons before finally moving on to new stories and pastures, with the press kit describing Romeria as the final part in her “family cycle”. In that sense, Garcia’s layered turn – a mix of reticence, persistence and pent-up angst – offers Simón the best way to channel all of Marina’s (or her own) anxieties and anguish to the screen.
Director, screenwriter: Carla Simón
Producer: Maria Zamora
Cast: Llúcia Garcia, Mitch, Tristán Ulloa, Sara Casasnovas
Director of photography: Hélène Louvart
Editor: Sergio Jiménez
Production designer: Mónica Bernuy
Music composer: Ernest Pipó
Sound designer: Eva Valino
Production company: Elastica Films
World sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Spanish, French
115 minutes
