\n\t\u201cRomer\u00eda\u201d is the Spanish word for pilgrimage, ostensibly a clear and apt title for the third feature by writer-director Carla Sim\u00f3n. Based on travels the filmmaker herself undertook as a teenager to meet an extended family she had never known, this is a kind of road movie by sea, journeying in pursuit of some sense of self-completion. Yet as the film wends its way through the narrow streets, harbors and glittering waters of Spain\u2019s salty Galician coastline, immersing itself in chaotic gatherings of family and community, the title\u2019s spiritual aspect takes on a rueful irony. There\u2019s no holy destination or revelation here, and certainly no warm sense of homecoming \u2014 though in finding where she doesn\u2019t belong, Sim\u00f3n\u2019s fictional alter ego can at last make sense of her own fragmented childhood memories, and those she\u2019s retrieved from her late biological parents.<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter the expansive sociological study of her sophomore feature \u201cAlcarr\u00e0s,\u201d winner of the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlinale, Sim\u00f3n\u2019s latest sees her returning to the expressly autobiographical territory of her 2017 debut \u201cSummer 1993.\u201d Once again processing her grief and lingering disorientation in the wake of both her parents\u2019 AIDS-related deaths in the early 1990s, the new film is not a direct sequel to \u201cSummer 1993\u201d \u2014 her avatars are differently named and characterized in each \u2014 but does gracefully extend its predecessor\u2019s depiction of early childhood trauma to the tremulous brink of adulthood. No knowledge of Sim\u00f3n\u2019s life or previous work is required, however, to be drawn into this layered, wistfully moving memory piece, which is sure to further boost her rising arthouse profile after premiering in competition at Cannes. <\/p>\n
\n\tWe\u2019re now in the summer of 2004, and 18-year-old cinephile Marina (Ll\u00facia Garcia) is freshly graduated from high school and preparing to study filmmaking in Barcelona \u2014 with the aid of a scholarship for which she\u2019s still missing some essential paperwork. Required, for arcane bureaucratic reasons, is a notarized recognition of kinship from her paternal grandparents, who have never acknowledged or communicated with Marina in the years since her father died, leaving her to be raised by adoptive parents. That entails traveling all the way across the country to the city of Vigo on the edge of the Atlantic, where she\u2019s met by her genial uncle Lois (Trist\u00e1n Ulloa) and a loud gaggle of cousins, who in turn ferry her to the grandparental home \u2014 though not before a languid day\u2019s sailing and swimming around the picturesque C\u00edes Islands, where Marina\u2019s parents spent their own youth frolicking.<\/p>\n
\n\tMarina\u2019s loose, camcorder-shot video diary of her trip is often laid over narrated extracts from her mother\u2019s journal written some 20-odd years before \u2014 which detail her ambitions, insecurities and moments of bliss in her itinerant relationship with Alfonso, Marina\u2019s father, as they drift around the same shores their daughter is now exploring for the first time. The paralleling of these twin accounts serves, among other things, to show how far Marina\u2019s path has diverged from that of the parents who never got to see her grow up: Where they were reckless, restless, increasingly drug-dependent hedonists, she\u2019s a quiet observer of life, reserved and straightedge, bemused by the rowdy antics of her oldest cousin Nuno (mononymous actor Mitch) and his cohort.<\/p>\n
\n\tYet while the family, in all its whirling, garrulous energy, appears outwardly welcoming to the newcomer, Marina soon encounters limits to their acceptance. Her grandmother (Marina Troncoso) is haughty and openly hostile, asking only why it\u2019s taken her this long to visit, and while her grandfather (Jos\u00e9 \u00c1ngel Egido) is friendlier, he\u2019d rather pay her off generously than sign any forms legally binding them. Marina\u2019s young cousins, meanwhile, ask if she\u2019s ill, since they\u2019ve been told never to touch her blood: The disease that killed her parents remains a source of stigmatized shame in the family, and her presence is a discomfiting reminder of it. Through conversations with various relatives, Marina learns from their conflicting accounts how fundamental facts of her parents\u2019 lives have been kept secret from her: Childhood memories are revised in real time, and her sense of self is thrown in flux.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs in her previous features, Sim\u00f3n\u2019s filmmaking is warmly tactile and attuned to both human movement and geographic texture. Her first collaboration with world cinema super-DP H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Louvart feels entirely natural, the camera mobile but breezily unhurried as it weaves through heaving domestic spaces or around the rusted, characterful cityscape of Vigo, drinking in the milky sunlight and long afternoon shadows, but never resorting to postcard compositions. <\/p>\n
\n\tA slight swerve into daydreamy magical realism in the film\u2019s second half comes as a surprise from Sim\u00f3n, though it\u2019s grounded in purpose, serving as a bridge from Marina\u2019s self-shot evocation of her parents\u2019 youth to direct, grainy, unprettified flashbacks to days of hanging out, shooting up and making love. Thus do we become privy to sensory flashes outside our protagonist\u2019s perspective, from trippy nights on the titles in 1980s punk clubs to a tangle of leathery seaweed and tattooed limbs during one beachside embrace. Sim\u00f3n\u2019s sweetly sorrowful ode to lost family imagines what might have been, while acknowledging that not all memories can be passed down between generations \u2014 some die deliciously with us. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cRomer\u00eda\u201d is the Spanish word for pilgrimage, ostensibly a clear and apt title for the third feature by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[6639,53688,77,3943,53689,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-120312","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-cannes-film-festival","9":"tag-carla-simon","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-romeria","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114546919531054389","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}