“Romería,” the new film by Carla Simón (Golden Bear at Berlinale 2022 for “Alcarràs”), is a present-day project depicting a story set in 2004 but immersed in an ‘80s vibe. After a film that focused on social themes, the director returns to an autobiographical exploration of her roots, told in the manner of “will-have-been.”

Romería grapples with a question beloved by contemporary auteur documentaries: Where do you come from? The tone, however, is unmistakably that of established Cannes fiction: the tone of a gifted nerd. And since nerds are rightly in fashion today, we must credit the film with a certain evocative force – images soaked in the scent of wanderlust and the fleeting nature of youth. Collapsing eras into a subtle film about filiation, Simón is clearly still speaking in the first person – with all the trappings that entails (a comprehensible structure, a stand-in character for her own experience), fiction here acts as a minimal shield against the sting of memory. Setting the action near the city of Vigo, far from the Barcelona center – which looms like a black hole in the story, constantly threatening to corrupt freedom – the filmmaker steps into an isolated province: “romería” means pilgrimage, and this one is both immanent and geographical, unfolding on two levels – one of immersion in bygone lives, and one of coexistence with their indelible remnants.

None of this is new. We’ve seen Simón’s film, in one form or another, so many times that the images blur into a kind of generic paste: return to roots, a desire to uncover family secrets, the gap between the heat of memory and the softness of the present. Still, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that while Romería may not be original, it does exhibit a delicate gaze that requires a certain talent. Maturity begins to emerge in scenes where Marina, this 18-year-old teenager (Llúcia Garcia), gazes wistfully into the distance (as teens do), and in those where she is taken in by her extended family – a lunch scene becomes the film’s mise-en-scène showpiece, handling this stream of characters with understated finesse. The film loops through more or less inspired moments, ultimately sketching out, beneath the surface, the end of a utopia.

The ‘80s, as we know, mean parties, drugs, intensity. Early in the film, we learn that the protagonist’s parents died some time ago – later we understand they belonged to that unrepeatable mould that came before our shapeless present. Simón builds the film’s dramaturgy in a fairly monotonous fashion, with various banal exchanges that inevitably lead to revelations that flesh out the backstory: that the two died of AIDS, that they were heroin addicts, and that, at least in the case of Alfonso – the father, whose family we now visit – the illness was accompanied by shame and silence: he died in a form of forced hush-hush, hidden by his own family. The story thus reveals a small-town mentality that Simón manages to make sticky and unpleasant with just a few strokes. “I’m not trying to make excuses for our parents,” Alfonso’s brother, an ageing hippie in whom Marina finds understanding, tells her, “but people did that kind of thing all the time back then.” Into the de-radicalised climate of 2004 seeps this shadow of concealment, this trauma that the script wisely refrains from underlining too forcefully: the mere mention of Alfonso’s “hiding” is enough to make it impossible to look at any of the grandparents, uncles, aunts, and others the same way again. Hovering between sympathy and condemnation, the film drafts a sort of P.S. to that era, charged with the unspoken pain of a fait accompli: in the relatives’ house, the past is off-limits.

After a time in which the parents’ presence is evoked through the convenient journal the mother kept in the ‘80s, Romería offers a dreamlike sequence where the couple comes to life: the filmmaker wisely chooses to embody these two idealists using her 2004 protagonist (now without bangs) and her cousin Nuno (Mitch Martín), transformed into a tattooed young man with a sculpted torso. This imagery quickly hits its limit, coming off more sappy than poetic: we see them frolicking among coastal rocks in a stereotypical vision of young love, then we witness the injection of a dose and the first sign of withdrawal. The flashback leads no further: in the ellipsis between this moment and the known ending years later, we sense the dream has been shattered. The very distance between the vigour of youth and that unjust death charges the film with a tragic undercurrent kept off-screen.

The exercise, then, has proven worthwhile: Marina has found her family and had the blood tie officially certified (orphaned, she had been living with adoptive parents until then). Now bearing both surnames, she can begin, as the saying goes, a new chapter in her life: she’ll study film, as we could already guess from her DV camera, that inexhaustible nostalgia machine. Simón has delivered a respectful (and likely therapeutic) film, though a touch of real ‘80s punk wouldn’t have hurt, especially given how deferentially she seeks to celebrate that era – albeit only in theory. Deliberately or not, Romería teaches us that time has passed, and that glorious generation now survives only in the memories of those who were lucky (or unlucky) enough to live on.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.