ROMERIA – Review by Sarah Ward
When someone is told that they bear a resemblance to another person, appearance is never the sole reason. No matter how striking the aesthetic similarities, and regardless of how warranted the term “spitting image” proves, that comment — that urge to comment, too — is as much about emotional echoes. We can mirror others in a variety of ways, looks among them, but the feelings that such commonalties both recall and inspire are the real currency of the moment and message. When a relative informs the 18-year-old niece they’ve just met that she brings her own mother to mind, then, as happens in Carla Simón’s richly evocative and resonant Romería, they’re communing with memories as much as with the teen in their presence — confronted by recollections that catch them by surprise, clearly, and transferring those remembrances to the girl now standing, and yearning and searching, right in front of them.
In her third feature after 2017’s also-exceptional Summer 1993 and 2022’s equally outstanding Berlinale Golden Bear-winner Alcarràs, Simón shows that truth in action again and again. Indeed, she aptly lets it reverberate throughout her gorgeously layered and realised film, which itself is a movie that lingers long after viewing. Each time that Marina (Llúcia Garcia) hears that she makes a paternal uncle, aunt, cousin or the like think of her mom, Romería ensures that its audience knows, just as its protagonist does, that the current source of that statement is grappling with the decades of baggage attached to her mother’s memory — and her father’s. Accordingly, the girl’s long-lost relations see a soon-to-be college student trying to learn her family history, and also see the ghost of an earlier young woman; in turn, they’re reminded of the loved one, Marina’s dad, that they lost over a decade prior and now barely speak about.
Gathering the Piñeiro clan all in one spot is an administrative matter, first and foremost, so that Marina can secure a scholarship to attend university. Unless she has the paperwork to prove that she’s her father’s daughter, her dreams of studying cinema will disappear, and only her grandparents (Yo, traidor’s Marina Troncoso and Atasco’s José Ángel Egido) can add her name to the record. Cue Marina’s visit to the Atlantic-perched city of Vigo. Like the sea that’s rarely far from view, meeting the other side of her family comes in waves, from her houseboat dwelling uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa, A Widow’s Game), his wife Denise (Celine Tyll, Sanctuary) and their children (HIT’s Mitch, plus León Romagosa and Hans Romagosa) onwards. New faces, new places, new sentiments, new revelations: each lap at Marina, but details about her mother and father — information that she’s trying to reconcile with her mum’s diary — washes in and drifts out with every interaction. That their romance and deaths are clouded by the shadows of addiction and AIDS only compounds her struggles to piece together the full picture.
Romería’s title means “pilgrimage”, a journey in Simón’s involving narrative that’s similarly not only physical but also emotional — the latter for the kin reunited with Marina as well. They’re forced to recall the hows and whys of the teen’s absence from their lives until now, and of her parents’ passings. As this cannily tender-but-never-sentimental film explores, and as Marina gleans across five sunny days in her relatives’ company circa 2004, these are feelings long buried with the dead. These are memories with no one definitive version, either, whether Marina is trying to simply work out where her mother and father lived before she was conceived, fill in any other biographical gaps (the type that are mere tidbits to most, but mean everything when they’re all that you have left of the mom and dad you can’t remember) or get to the bottom of glaring discrepancies.
Simón has done it again — made a marvel of a movie, that is, and one so teeming with insight and spirit that its personal ties are always evident, as was the case with both Summer 1993 and Alcarràs. The Spanish writer/director may prefer to stay in semi-autobiographical territory; however, as she keeps amassing a resume enviable for its intimacy and intelligence, her work is no less affecting for fictionalising some of the specifics. Here, Simón once was budding filmmaker Marina, just as she was once Summer 1993’s six-year-old Frida. In the two, she copes with the aftermath of becoming an orphan via an impressively raw and textured feature. Her skill with untried actors, guiding seemingly effortless performances out of screen debutants, shines with the luminous Garcia, too; while it might be easier for a director to recognise themselves in a fresh discovery, hanging entire films off of newcomers is still a bold move, but one that keeps paying off.
Indeed, mirroring is a trait of Romería’s very construction, not just its story and themes. With cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s involvement, that remains accurate, the French talent’s crisp-yet-dreamy lensing as at home among her own past works — Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats and Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, and Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro and La Chimera, notably — as among Simon’s. Thinking that Romería’s power stems purely from resemblance, though, is a mistake. This is a picture as shrewdly composed overall and anew as each postcard-perfect shot. With a camcorder often in hand, plus a willingness to imagine the missing fragments in her mother and father’s tale always apparent, Marina is eager to move beyond her relations’ unreliable memories and associated baggage. Romería is a product of Simon’s history, yes, and of the continued pull of interrogating her own story, but it’s also a way of synthesising and reframing those echoes. The sublime third-act flight of fantasy that ushers the movie towards its well-earned conclusion, and helps Marina claim an account of her parents that’s her own? Alongside perhaps offering the biggest departure yet from Simon’s love of naturalism, it’s Romería’s heart and soul.
