[ad_1]
A textbook instance of the troublesome follow-up album — or function movie, on this occasion — Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón’s Romería strains beneath the load of her final movie Alcarras, which gained the Golden Bear on the Berlinale in 2022, was then invited to 90 extra festivals and was as near an ideal pastorale as any movie can declare to be. Drawing on her personal Catalan household tales, Alcarras handled a household of tenant farmers about to be evicted from the land they’ve labored for generations. It was a movie of sorrow and anger however, above all, a swirl of loving, bickering household life. Along with that movie and her 2017 debut, Summer 1993, Romería is grounded in Simón’s private historical past. This time, she revisits and transforms a visit she took on the age of 17 to Vigo in Galicia, the place her father grew up and her mother and father met.
The 12 months is 2004. Fresh-faced Marina — the fictionalized Simón, performed by street-casting discovery Llucia Garcia — arrives in Vigo to fulfill one other dense knot of cousins, aunts and her paternal grandparents. Marina grew up in Barcelona, the place her mom returned when she was born. Her father, so far as she is aware of, died when she was a child. Her mom died when she was 11. Both mother and father used heroin, each died of AIDS. Ostensibly, Marina’s most urgent aim is to acquire a sworn assertion from her grandparents of her paternity, which was by no means formally recorded, if she is to have the ability to declare examine help as an orphan. Blurred along with her have to get a bit of paper, nevertheless, is one thing extra existential and clearly Simón’s actual curiosity: a eager for shared recollections. For no matter purpose, her father’s household has maintained radio silence since she was a toddler. All Marina is aware of about her mother and father’ life in Vigo is contained in her mom’s outdated diary.
The diary is her guidebook. She needs to see the residence the place they lived, the boat they used to take up the coast to Portugal, the seashore the place she imagines them frolicking bare within the solar, basking within the festive freedom of the post-Franco years. Wearing an outdated costume of her mom’s, she is like Alice venturing into her household’s seaside wonderland; whimsical dream sequences present her younger mother and father as if in house motion pictures, the digicam jerking and the colours light erratically. She shares their fantasy of themselves as romantic rebels. But as she’s going to notice, even a secret diary — “Don’t even think about reading this!” says the entrance web page, scrawled in an exuberantly infantile hand — doesn’t essentially inform the reality.
Her personal time, against this, is shot largely in obtainable mild. Interiors are darkish in opposition to the brilliant home windows, exteriors dazzling. There are secrets and techniques right here, however it’s onerous for us to pin down what they’re. Perhaps these folks have merely forgotten when Marina’s father Fon died and what he was like. Or have they? Marina solely has to float to a window to overhear a number of of her innumerable family members muttering about her, what she needs, and when she is likely to be considering of leaving. As in Alcarras, the true adults within the room usually transform the youngsters, who can’t see any purpose to maintain their elders’ secrets and techniques.
Garcia is a outstanding discovery. Her Marina has a face as cell as the ocean she discovers she loves; one second infantile, the following melancholy with realizing. Like the ocean, she is endlessly watchable. By distinction, her brood of uncles and cousins, who confusingly resemble the parallel hippie gang within the 1983 sequences, by no means purchase definition as particular person characters. Only as a bunch do they coalesce satisfactorily: watching dolphins from the deck of the yacht, gathering to sing filthy bar-room ballads, or hovering round their toxic matriarch, first encountered on her daybed watching video footage of the marriage of King Carlos. Her era had its pretensions, nevertheless tough the household appears now.
Between these extra stable moments, nevertheless, is a waft of allusions and trails of knowledge that merely peter out, probably in a deliberate mirroring of Marina’s personal frustrations. Much extra intentionally structured than the largely improvised Alcarras, it truly feels free by comparability, its quest narrative by no means working up momentum. What is strongest, albeit as subtext, is the lived expertise of La Movida, the place the older era was confronted with the insanity of a youthful era that had minimize its ties with Catholic, conservative Spain so severely as to develop into unknowable.
But that is discovered solely by inference, whereas every little thing else is frayed free ends. We finish the movie having discovered nothing about Marina’s life earlier than she arrived in Vigo, nothing in regards to the adoptive mom who retains texting, nothing in regards to the varied different family members who died in what seems to have been a scorched-earth expertise of substance abuse. Even the rationale she’s there — that declaration of paternity – is so fudged I needed to ask a Spanish colleague afterwards what it was about.
Romería glows with heat, however so many hints at not very a lot makes the method of storytelling really feel as heavy as moist sand. Simón reaches a sort of level, however she actually takes the great distance spherical.
Title: Romería
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director/screenwriter: Carla Simón
Cast: Llúcia Garcia, Tristán Ulloa, Mitch Martin, Sara Casasnovas
Sales agent: MK2
Running time: 1 hr 55 minutes