Director: Carla Simón
Stars: Llúcia Garcia, Mitch, Tristán Ulloa
Carla Simón’s cinema traverses time and memory in search of some kind of truth embedded in nostalgia. These are family truths, rooted in our connectivity to one another. That was true of Summer of 1993 and the even more excellent Alcarràs, and so it goes again with her latest, Romería, a nakedly autobiographical dive into the heady waters of her own knotty familial coming of age discoveries.
Departing from Catalonian hills that typified her prior efforts, Romería takes us to the coast of the Atlantic and the region surrounding the small city of Vigo. It’s 2004 and Simón’s onscreen avatar Marina (Llúcia Garcia) is 18 years old with dreams of studying cinema. In the process of trying to obtain her prized scholarship she discovers that her parentage was never made official with the civil registry, and so she will need signatures from her grandparents. This necessity reconnects her with an array of extended family members and pries open a box of closeted secrets surrounding the death of her father, Alfonso. Marina’s narrative is that he died of some illness in 1987, but that doesn’t tally with the stories she’s starting to hear, and the amorphous sense of shame and evasiveness typified when the subject is raised.
This opening stretch of the film feels loose and drifting, undulating like the seas which preoccupy the picture. Even Simón’s chosen name for her screen alias is aquatic. Romería presents with diaristic qualities and, via Marina’s camera, uses the recorded image as a gateway into the past. So we have a story told in our present, set 20 years earlier, which looks back a further 20 years to find it’s kernels of truth. Looking down into Romería feels like peering into a well. A well of memory. Still, there’s a casual prettiness and familiarity (no pun intended) about it that doesn’t wholly hook, rather like flitting through someone else’s fading holiday snaps. The mystery feels a little too slight.
But, as Romería evolves, so it comes into sharper focus… ironically through means that muddy the film’s reality. While the midsection rewards greatly as Marina’s strong character is forced to the fore by her grandfather (José Ángel Egido), who tries to bribe her away from her goals, Simón’s ambitions reveal themselves more fully when the young woman pays some local festivities a visit and a drug-induced fever dream takes over the picture. Guided out of her comfort zone by her smouldering cousin Nuno (Mitch), Marina takes an internalised voyage of discovery, processing the things she has learned about her father into a fantasia as playful and imaginative as anything in Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette or even Jean Rollin. Day turns to night and vice versa with the speed of a cut, characters traverse rope ladders to the top of tall apartment blocks, and Marina takes on the role of her own mother with Nuno substituting for the father she’s coming to know through rumour and hearsay.
The overall ebb and flow of this giddy storm of backend creativity is akin to the film-within-a-film that wraps up Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II, but played out for almost an entire act of the movie. It stretches on so long that you come second guess if we’re actually going to snap back. There were brief moments where I wondered if Simón had simply abandoned the relative realism that had steadied the picture for so long. But then something stunning will happen to reaffirm her mastery of this late-blooming ostentation. Like, for instance, a goth line-dancing number set to some irresistible post-punk jam. The truth is that Simón handles both modes of the film so well that the disperate sensibilities are easily delineated from one another. And for anybody uncertain, just keep an eye on the cat.
Coming out of this reverie, we’re left aware of just how confident a filmmaker Simón has been, before, during and after this watery change in sensibility. She’s fast becoming one of the most interesting and dependable names not just in Spanish cinema, but across Europe. Her onscreen substitute Garcia impresses also, beginning closed and quiet – which helps bloom those inscrutable feelings early doors – but with an intrinsic sense of independence. Through Garcia Romería grows into one of the more interesting and effortless coming of age stories to hit screens in recent years, while Simón uses the opportunity not just to reflect on a version of her own history, but to shine a spotlight on Spain’s cowardly response to the AIDS crisis and notions of drug rehabilitation. When one character, mid-film, melodramatically suggests the world would be better off without Spain, we can laugh at the ludicrousness of the statement, but come the end we appreciate the despair and frustration that generated such feeling. Simón is comfortably three-for-three.
The Lost Highway Hotel 