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.
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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, resuscitating 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.