Contains spoilers.
****
Where blood is thicker than water
Stunning underwater filming of spectacular marine life near the Cies Islands off the coast of Spain serves as an inviting prologue to a tale of a teenager’s odyssey to discover the distressing truth about the deaths of her parents.
Marina (Llúcia Garcia) wishes to go to university to study film. To be eligible for a scholarship, she needs to be mentioned on her father’s death certificate. As it stands, her father is registered as dead and childless. She, honest and innocent, is plain evidence that someone has been lying.
Carla Simon’s semi-autobiographical film Romería (pilgrimage) charts Marina’s quest to unravel the shameful mystery and finally to enjoy a relationship, if only imagined, with her long dead parents.
She travels to the port of Vigo, the homeplace of her father’s family. His brothers, and his own father, still live there. Marina stays with the extended family and enjoys, sometimes awkwardly, their company. This is the early 2000s, as the annoying Nokia ringtone reminds us when Marina keeps in touch with her stepmother.
Incrementally, and often in casual conversation with her cousins, Marina learns that much of the information she has been given about her parents is false. Her father’s generation tell one story. Their offspring tell another. She believed that her father died when she was just months old; in fact she was five. Why did he never travel to Barcelona to visit her?
Marina frequently declines the alcohol and recreational drug use of her new companions. Despite being attracted by one of the group, she is not interested in having a boyfriend, she tells her stepmother. As she moves towards a deeper understanding of her real parents’ fate, her grandfather gives her an envelope stuffed with cash as a substitute for the sought after scholarship. It is a sop, a consolation, an expression of guilt. She is having none of it.
Swimming is a recurring motif. The grace and beauty of the young swimmers, their bodies enjoying the free spirited nature of the saltwater and its limitless horizons. The aptly named Marina and her cousin Nuno are mirrored in flashbacks of her young parents, swimming free and cavorting in the seaweed. Contrast with the grandmother’s swimming pool, from which she has banned her ‘dirty’ grandchildren until they have showered. Swimming pools are symbols of middle class success. Cultivated and manicured, the sea as a confined slave. Dirty leaves in the water are a pollutant, as far as she is concerned. Like infected blood.
Marina’s anger with her grandfather manifests itself in her return of the money. But for the grandmother, Marina’s ire hits a higher level. Her single malicious act is to empty a bin liner full of dirty leaves into the swimming pool at night time. This is revenge on the woman who should have cared for, and not confined, her AIDS ridden father through his declining agonies.
One of the strengths of this film is the creation of this mild-mannered, polite, outwardly reserved but inwardly iron-willed character, brilliantly portrayed by Garcia.
There are regular flashbacks, narrated by Marina’s mother, to the 1980s. Hedonistic drug taking developed, or deteriorated into drug running, and addiction. As heroin addicts the two young parents became destitute, and ill. The young mother died first. The father, dying for years, was hidden from public view by the disgrace-averse middle-class parents. Their cruelty, and their subsequent deception, is exposed to the persistent Marina who, in flickers of anger, conveys her gentle contempt. Fear of shame, of wagging local tongues, has superseded love and compassion in these shallow-minded protectors of personal pride and vanity. The adults, in varying degrees, have been complicit in this taciturn mendacity.
Towards the end of the film, Marina scales the high rise flat where her young parents enjoyed their lifestyles. She imagines, and shares with us, some touching moments that have been so long denied.
