The waves of the Spanish coastal Atlantic are as alternately prone to crashing against the rocks and as calmly breaking as the soul of the protagonist of Carla Simón‘s visually sumptuous new film, “Romería.”
Newcomer Llúcia Garcia, in her first major film role and whom the Spanish director found on the street amid a wide-ranging casting call for actors to play an 18-year-old woman at a pivotal spiritual turn, becomes the surrogate eyes and ears who embody Simón’s real-life story: Simón’s parents died of AIDS when she was a small child, sending her to northern Catalonia with an uncle. She was left, as a hardly formed six-year-old, to contend with little knowledge and fewer memories of her parents.
“Romería” finds the “Alcarràs” and “Summer 1993” filmmaker operating behind her most intensely personal lens yet. Where her family history was previously abstracted in her prior films about families fractured by circumstance, Marina (Garcia) is now a stand-in for the director, here a budding moviemaker herself, who travels to Galicia to convince the late paternal grandparents she’s never met to endorse a scholarship application to study cinema.
Her father’s family is startled by her resemblance to her late mother, whose own diaries form the thread that not only led Marina to take on a family pilgrimage, but also create the 1980s-set voiceover narration that contextualizes the film in 2004. Marina, with a digital camcorder and only scattered memories, sets out to explore the family she didn’t know.
The title, “Romería,” comes from a common southern Spanish word indicating a journey to pay homage to a religious shrine or figure. It’s also a synonym for a popular festival in Galicia, which is at the northwestern-most point of Spain, covering the top tip of Portugal. Who Marina is paying tribute to is left unspoken: her father? Her mother? It’s both, but “Romería” is missing an anchor to lock us into emotionally what exactly she is looking for beyond support for her film-school ambitions. Marina’s existence was all but wiped out from her family’s lineage, her name unmentioned in her father’s death certificate when he passed in the early 1990s.
Marina’s paternal grandparents refused to acknowledge her father Alfonso’s death, as the stigma of AIDS at the time was mostly wrapped up in homophobia — his death, it turns out, was from needle use amid heroin addiction, but his parents couldn’t and still won’t get past their prejudices.
Marina drifts through her pilgrimage, getting acquainted with her cousins while encountering few who match her intellectual equal in terms of curiosity. Nor, perhaps, her late mother’s temperament, which put her mother at odds against Alfonso’s parents when Marina was a child. Marina starts to show some of that, though, as she challenges her father’s family in need of their endorsement. At one point, her grandfather hands her a huge envelope of cash to fend her off, to get her to stop asking questions; Marina accepts it with some trepidation, as the windfall won’t answer her inquiries.
Beloved French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “La Chimera”) captures the surging swell of emotions, and the Galician coast, with often breath-stopping beauty. Where Simón’s screenplay can feel dramatically inert or prone to wanderlusting moments that don’t pay off or further embody its heroine’s searching path toward self-understanding in the present via reconciliation with the past, Louvart’s work here is bracing; you can feel the tactility of tanned flesh bathed in seasalt and uncertainty. Louvart films with an Alexa 35 that makes the sensations and textures of the coast ripple off the screen.
There is a seriously great sequence late in the film where Marina links up with a cousin, and they go on a drug-fueled, sensuous adventure with dark consequences. It turns out to be a fantasy — I don’t think someone like Marina as headstrong as she is would ever get so closely mixed up with a drug crowd anyway — but it hints at a more hedonistically alive movie around the corner (like one where, you know, she fucks her cousin and goes out of her head on dope, naked against the ocean rocks, writhing ecstatically among seagrass).
Simón and Garcia clearly found a special alchemy, though Marina remains hard to read, her emotions only able to break out via the memory or even words of her mother. (Simón reworked her mother’s own diaries, which were actually letters she wrote to friends while traveling, for the voiceover.) The coming-of-age autofiction genre is a hard one to tap at a moment when these narratives feel so commonplace at a festival like Cannes.
“Romería” isn’t without its own unique shape, or visual vitality, or a narrative sense of joie de vivre, but it doesn’t always stand out from the pack even as Simón deserves credit for rendering her autobiography in aesthetically sublime terms. While we leave “Romería” with a sense of Simón’s goals, we just aren’t as sure of Marina’s. This film, though, invites us to ponder where Marina might go next, and I wouldn’t object to a sequel that explores her later years. We do root for her, but that’s because we’re still trying to crack into who she is.
Grade: B-
“Romería” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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