'Romería': Fou love and family secrets in Galicia during the heroin epidemic

After the Golden Bear for Alcarrás in Berlin , Carla Simón closes her family trilogy with her third feature film, Romería , which competed for the Palme d'Or at the last Cannes Film Festival . The filmmaker from Catalonia once again delves into her memories to compose a film formally distant from her previous works: Romería does not seek the transparency of Verano 1993 (2017) and Alcarrás (2022), in which the cinematographic artifact was almost invisible to the viewer's eye . Here the intention is different, so much so that the film is carried away by the fantasy of its adolescent protagonist, Marina ( Llúcia Garcia ), a sort of alter ego of the director, who fantasizes about the hypothetical life of some parents - also adolescents - that she barely knew.

The commitment to a more artificial cinema is as risky as it is legitimate for a filmmaker who has built a prestigious career in festival cinema from her own experience, in what is the ultimate expression of auteur cinema, where the director is no longer just the subject of absolute responsibility for the film, but also its object. In Verano 1993 , Simón appeared at the Berlinale as a breath of fresh air and the spearhead of a generation of directors who have forged a new wave of intimate naturalism, attention to detail, and cinema of characters and moods.

Frida, the Girl Who Couldn't Cry, was constructed from scraps of the director's biography, featuring Laia Artigas with a raspy voice and hungry gaze. Alcarrás arrived five years later, in the final throes of the pandemic, when masks were beginning to disappear from movie theaters. Simón clung to his family's history , part of which was dedicated to agriculture, to dedicate the Segrià region to cinema, in a film starring natural actors and in which the script's framework was also hidden from view.

Romería begins with Marina's journey of discovery, a physical journey that takes her from Catalonia to Vigo, where her paternal family lives, with whom she has barely any contact. Her mother died of AIDS when she was young, as did her father, amidst an epidemic that ravaged several generations in the 1980s. Marina travels driven by a material goal - to obtain her grandparents' signature on a document recognizing her as her father's daughter, which will allow her to access a scholarship to study film - and a sentimental goal - to get to know her father better, who separated from her mother before she was born and who died without ever seeing her. Marina is accompanied by a video camera with which she records her daily life and also her mother's diary, in which she describes that youthful love marked by addiction, the desire to conquer the world, and an unexpected pregnancy. Two ways of preserving memory in different formats and different times.

Marina encounters the strangeness of a family in which she feels like a foreigner. With an uncle ( Tristán Ulloa ) who welcomes her diplomatically, but with whom she finds an artificial warmth, and cousins ​​who share a common past that she has not been a part of. With Nuno ( Mitch ), who is more or less her age, she will begin to feel those first bursts of summer infatuation , which will lead her to imagine the teenage love story between her parents. Simón also emphasizes the class difference : his grandparents made money in shipping businesses and are a well-known name in the city, so they hid their son's drug addiction, in that provincial need to keep up appearances.

And heroin , that great unspoken secret. The conversation about drugs is perhaps the most expository part of Romería . It's in these dialogues where the writing, the intention, is most evident. " Get studying so you don't end up a drug addict," or something similar, snaps the grandmother, the character most reluctant to acknowledge her granddaughter. A soundtrack is also all too present, playing at underlining a drama that the filmed image avoids falling into. Marina, little by little, adopts the role of her mother, even dressing in a carmine dress that belonged to her. A dress that reminds the protagonist of Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1968), a film about a crazy and destructive love, a cinematic reflection of her parents' relationship.

The film is built on the vision of Llúcia Garcia , making her acting debut and once again demonstrating Simón's skill as a director of actors . Her timid gestures condense the entire feeling of orphanhood, of not belonging, of a young woman who insists on rescuing her parents' relationship from oblivion. It is at the end of Romería, in the protagonist's first moment of relaxation, that the fantastic enters fully, the redefinition and construction of a new narrative that changes the discourse and point of view of the portrait to which her other family has always clung. Because Marina wants to shed light on a silence that is too dark.