Carla Simón’s Intimate Dive Into Family History

Three years after taking top honors in Berlin with her elegiac tribute to the generations of peach farmers in her family, Alcarràs, Carla Simón returns to territory more directly connected to her own past, a companion piece to her debut, Summer 1993. That 2018 film explored a transitional period in the life of a six-year-old girl — a fictionalized version of the director — sent to live with an uncle’s family in the Catalonia countryside after losing both her parents to AIDS. Simón’s third feature, Romería, centers on another semi-autobiographical stand-in, this time a budding filmmaker fresh out of high school, who travels to meet the family of her late father.

Her journey, while essentially planned to complete bureaucratic requirements on a film school scholarship, becomes an exhumation of the parents she was too young to know, their histories veiled in secrecy, shame and the blurry lens of time. That lens is filtered through the curious gaze of accomplished French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Never Rarely Sometimes Always, The Lost Daughter, La Chimera), whose work remains alluring, even when Simón’s storytelling risks seeming rudderless.

While the director has mostly switched here from the nonprofessional cast of Alcarràs to more seasoned actors, she entrusts the central role of her fictional counterpart Marina to impressive discovery Llúcia Garcia, who had no significant prior acting experience and was chosen after an exhaustive casting search.

When Marina goes to the records office to get a copy of her father’s death certificate for her scholarship paperwork, she finds that it lists no children. To have her name added, she will need to obtain notarized signatures from the paternal grandparents she has never met, on the other side of the country. Armed with her camcorder, she travels in 2004 from Barcelona to the Atlantic coast, where her relatives live, in and around the port city of Vigo in Galicia.

That area was also the playground of her birth parents before she was born, and the underlying purpose of Marina’s visit is evident in the film’s title, the Spanish word for “pilgrimage.”

She is met on arrival by her affable uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa), who turns out to be among her more forthcoming relatives even if his recollections don’t always correspond to what she was told as a child. There’s also a rowdy bunch of cousins with whom she goes swimming off her uncle’s sailing boat, yielding beautiful shots of bodies darting through the water over coral reefs around the Cíes Islands.

Marina’s video footage of the coastal waters is accompanied by intermittent voiceovers from her mother’s journal entries in the mid-‘80s, and by chapter headings that can be a bit prosaic. (Those passages were adapted from letters that Simón’s mother wrote to friends during her travels.) But while almost every distant relative she meets summons vague memories of her parents, either first-hand or gleaned from others, the timeline of where they lived at various points in the relationship remains vague. There’s even some uncertainty about Marina’s exact place of birth.

Any volunteering of information about her biological mother and father is instantly cut off when she meets her grandparents. Marina’s imperious grandmother (Marina Troncoso) is a disagreeable snob, more concerned with getting a mani-pedi or keeping leaves out of her precious swimming pool than getting to know her granddaughter. (This later provokes a fabulously petty act of FU defiance from Marina.)

Her grandfather (José Ángel Egido) is ostensibly warmer, though Marina is dismayed to learn that he offered her father, Alfonso, a large sum of money as an incentive to stop seeing her mother. When Marina finds out her parents were using and possibly dealing heroin, her questions become more pointed. She’s even more disturbed to learn that the family hid her father way when he got sick, allowing him no visitors.

The stigma of drug use and AIDS makes both grandparents prickly when pushed for information about Alfonso. This is especially apparent when her grandfather sits like a Mafia don while nephews, nieces and grandchildren line up to pay their respects. When Marina’s turn comes, he hands her an envelope with a fat wad of cash, supposedly to cover her film school expenses but implicitly intended to make her stop asking uncomfortable questions.

All this becomes a bit discursive, and frankly, dull — almost like a coastal Carlos Saura family portrait without the politics and without the clean lines and character definition to make the sprawl of relatives especially interesting. There’s a hint of flirtation and mutual attraction between Marina and an older cousin, Nuno (mononymous actor Mitch), but that remains more of a tease than a promise.

Things get more intriguing when Marina starts interacting with her parents, creating pictures and memories of them in her head. She first encounters them lounging on deck chairs on a terrace in blazing sunlight, like an apparition. By way of an introduction, they tell her, “You see we’re not dead. They just hid us away.” She pictures them wandering naked over rocks on the shoreline, embracing in the sand in a tangle of seaweed or lazing on a boat, watching dolphins.

In a departure from Simón’s signature naturalistic approach, she drops in a fantasy sequence in which Marina and Nuno drift into a druggy nightclub, where they slide into a cool formation dance routine to Spanish pop. That segues for Marina into images of her parents both sensual and sad, shooting up or strung out in need of a fix. As disturbing as those pictures are, they at least provide Marina with some kind of access to the parents she was too young to remember. (Having Garcia double as Marina’s mother with a markedly different look was a nice touch.)

The final developments, specifically the circumstances by which Marina — and not her grandparents — gets to dictate the wording on her father’s updated death certificate, are too rushed to be entirely clear. But as the outcome of a journey in which Marina fortifies her connection to two of the most important people in her life, it works well enough.

Romería is an elegant, visually poetic film, if slightly less lucid than the director’s previous work. But it’s an odd fit for the main competition in Cannes; its intimate investigation of family history and mystery likely would have played better in the eclectic Un Certain Regard sidebar.