Catalan filmmaker Carla Simon made her name with the tiny, plotless, yet moving family dramas Summer 1993 and Alcarras. Now, with Romeria, she expands her ambitions into a magical realist mystery but, sadly, the leap has not been made gracefully. A few strikingly beautiful moments aside, Romeria is a frustratingly dull and repetitive film, taking ages to go nowhere in a story with far less substance than it needs to power two hours of mostly opaque filmmaking.
With a title that roughly translates to ‘pilgrimage’, Romeria follows Marina (Llucia Garcia), an adopted girl in 2004 Galicia who has just turned 18 and is now exercising her right to independently investigate her birth family, mostly in order to sort out a paperwork issue that is preventing her from applying for university grants. What starts as an administrative issue soon becomes a much more emotionally draining task, though, Marina unable to get coherent, consistent answers from her various aunts and uncles about what exactly happened to her (both long dead) parents and why she never really heard from her surviving family.
The answers centre on her stuck-up grandparents on her dad’s side, who would rather just pay Marina to go away than acknowledge her as their granddaughter, but finally arriving at this conclusion is a real slog. Marina’s frustration at her family quickly becomes contagious as we see basically the same scene over and over again – an aunt or uncle tells their version of the truth (invariably one that soothes the teller’s own guilt) which contradicts a previous version. Simon keeps her mystery vague here, which starts out a little bit intriguing but soon just becomes an unnecessary bore, especially as the more salacious reveals (Marina’s parents were heroin addicts and dealers who died of AIDS) are actually things Marina already knows.
A later move into more overt magical realism breathes a bit of life into things, but even this drags on for too long while repeating stuff we already know, all while carrying a creepily incestuous charge, a streak of sleaze that the overall tone never gels with. With Summer 1993 and Alcarras, Simon also made ‘nothing happens’ films, but those had such richer, better-acted characters that the lack of incident could be turned into a strength, simply allowing you more time with the ensembles. Romeria’s performances are more muted and its characters much more alien to one another, so spending time with them can’t be a goal unto itself.
There are moments here and there of genuine intrigue and beauty (an interpretive dance sequence about the deaths of the AIDS crisis is a highlight), and it’s a solid debut performance from Garcia, having to shuffle between roles when the magical realism stuff kicks in, but Romeria is too long a walk to too underwhelming a destination. The first real miss for me of Simon’s career, it’s not a pilgrimage worth taking.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 