Carla Simón’s Intimate Dive Into Household Historical past

Three years after taking high honors in Berlin along with her elegiac tribute to the generations of peach farmers in her household, Alcarràs, Carla Simón returns to territory extra instantly related to her personal previous, a companion piece to her debut, Summer season 1993. That 2018 movie explored a transitional interval within the lifetime of a six-year-old lady — a fictionalized model of the director — despatched to reside with an uncle’s household within the Catalonia countryside after shedding each her mother and father to AIDS. Simón’s third function, Romería, facilities on one other semi-autobiographical stand-in, this time a budding filmmaker recent out of highschool, who travels to fulfill the household of her late father.

Her journey, whereas basically deliberate to finish bureaucratic necessities on a movie faculty scholarship, turns into an exhumation of the mother and father she was too younger to know, their histories veiled in secrecy, disgrace and the blurry lens of time. That lens is filtered by way of the curious gaze of achieved French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (By no means Not often Generally All the time, The Misplaced Daughter, La Chimera), whose work stays alluring, even when Simón’s storytelling dangers seeming rudderless.

Whereas the director has largely switched right here from the nonprofessional solid of Alcarràs to extra seasoned actors, she entrusts the central position of her fictional counterpart Marina to spectacular discovery Llúcia Garcia, who had no important prior appearing expertise and was chosen after an exhaustive casting search.

When Marina goes to the information workplace to get a duplicate of her father’s dying certificates for her scholarship paperwork, she finds that it lists no youngsters. To have her identify added, she might want to acquire notarized signatures from the paternal grandparents she has by no means met, on the opposite facet of the nation. Armed along with her camcorder, she travels in 2004 from Barcelona to the Atlantic coast, the place her kin reside, in and across the port metropolis of Vigo in Galicia.

That space was additionally the playground of her beginning mother and father earlier than she was born, and the underlying function of Marina’s go to is obvious within the movie’s title, the Spanish phrase for “pilgrimage.”

She is met on arrival by her affable uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa), who seems to be amongst her extra forthcoming kin even when his recollections don’t all the time correspond to what she was instructed as a toddler. There’s additionally a rowdy bunch of cousins with whom she goes swimming off her uncle’s crusing boat, yielding stunning pictures of our bodies darting by way of the water over coral reefs across the Cíes Islands.

Marina’s video footage of the coastal waters is accompanied by intermittent voiceovers from her mom’s journal entries within the mid-‘80s, and by chapter headings that may be a bit prosaic. (These passages had been tailored from letters that Simón’s mom wrote to associates throughout her travels.) However whereas virtually each distant relative she meets summons obscure reminiscences of her mother and father, both first-hand or gleaned from others, the timeline of the place they lived at varied factors within the relationship stays obscure. There’s even some uncertainty about Marina’s actual place of origin.

Any volunteering of details about her organic mom and father is immediately reduce off when she meets her grandparents. Marina’s imperious grandmother (Marina Troncoso) is a unpleasant snob, extra involved with getting a mani-pedi or preserving leaves out of her treasured swimming pool than attending to know her granddaughter. (This later provokes a fabulously petty act of FU defiance from Marina.)

Her grandfather (José Ángel Egido) is ostensibly hotter, although Marina is dismayed to study that he provided her father, Alfonso, a big sum of cash as an incentive to cease seeing her mom. When Marina finds out her mother and father had been utilizing and probably dealing heroin, her questions change into extra pointed. She’s much more disturbed to study that the household hid her father means when he obtained sick, permitting him no guests.

The stigma of drug use and AIDS makes each grandparents prickly when pushed for details about Alfonso. That is particularly obvious when her grandfather sits like a Mafia don whereas nephews, nieces and grandchildren line as much as pay their respects. When Marina’s flip comes, he arms her an envelope with a fats wad of money, supposedly to cowl her movie faculty bills however implicitly supposed to make her cease asking uncomfortable questions.

All this turns into a bit discursive, and albeit, uninteresting — virtually like a coastal Carlos Saura household portrait with out the politics and with out the clear strains and character definition to make the sprawl of kin particularly attention-grabbing. There’s a touch of flirtation and mutual attraction between Marina and an older cousin, Nuno (mononymous actor Mitch), however that is still extra of a tease than a promise.

Issues get extra intriguing when Marina begins interacting along with her mother and father, creating footage and reminiscences of them in her head. She first encounters them lounging on deck chairs on a terrace in blazing daylight, like an apparition. By means of an introduction, they inform her, “You see we’re not lifeless. They only hid us away.” She footage them wandering bare over rocks on the shoreline, embracing within the sand in a tangle of seaweed or lazing on a ship, watching dolphins.

In a departure from Simón’s signature naturalistic strategy, she drops in a fantasy sequence wherein Marina and Nuno drift right into a druggy nightclub, the place they slide right into a cool formation dance routine to Spanish pop. That segues for Marina into pictures of her mother and father each sensual and unhappy, capturing up or strung out in want of a repair. As disturbing as these footage are, they at the least present Marina with some sort of entry to the mother and father she was too younger to recollect. (Having Garcia double as Marina’s mom with a markedly completely different look was a pleasant contact.)

The ultimate developments, particularly the circumstances by which Marina — and never her grandparents — will get to dictate the wording on her father’s up to date dying certificates, are too rushed to be fully clear. However as the end result of a journey wherein Marina fortifies her connection to 2 of crucial folks in her life, it really works properly sufficient.

Romería is a chic, visually poetic movie, if barely much less lucid than the director’s earlier work. Nevertheless it’s an odd match for the principle competitors in Cannes; its intimate investigation of household historical past and thriller probably would have performed higher within the eclectic Un Sure Regard sidebar.