Early in \u201cRomer\u00eda,\u201d the film\u2019s main character, Marina, is asked by some children if she\u2019s ever seen the Santa Compa\u00f1a, a collection of ghosts who, in Spanish legend, supposedly wander in a pack across the landscape. Humoring the kids, Marina says she hasn\u2019t. That\u2019s good, one of the girls responds. \u201cThey\u2019re spirits that can\u2019t die.\u201d<\/p>\n
As it happens, Marina is actually on a journey of sorts to connect with the dead \u2014 and so is Spanish writer-director Carla Sim\u00f3n, whose third feature is an autobiographical tale about her own quest to make peace with her late parents. Slender but flecked with magical touches, \u201cRomer\u00eda\u201d is so gentle it never quite qualifies as haunting. Nonetheless, Sim\u00f3n stirs up the ineffable sadness that comes with wanting answers to the mysteries of your family \u2014 and then, like it or not, receiving them.<\/p>\n
Newcomer Ll\u00facia Garcia plays Marina, an 18-year-old aspiring filmmaker. It\u2019s July 2004, and she\u2019s traveled to the picturesque port city of Vigo to obtain government paperwork that will make her eligible for a university scholarship. She never knew her father Alfonso, who died in 1987. For some reason, there are no records indicating that she was his daughter. Hence the trip to Vigo to see her paternal grandparents for the first time so she can authenticate her ancestry.<\/p>\n
Sim\u00f3n, whose previous features \u201cSummer 1993\u201d<\/a> and \u201cAlcarr\u00e0s\u201d<\/a> also grappled with family matters, follows along with Marina on the way to this anxious meeting. Marina\u2019s mother died only a few years after Alfonso, making Marina an orphan. But the mom\u2019s parting gift, a diary, provides opaque glimpses into her life with Alfonso in the mid-1980s. Before Marina arrives at her grandparents\u2019 home, though, she must run a gauntlet of uncles, aunts and cousins, their reactions to her existence varying from warm to wary. Repeatedly, Marina is told she looks just like her mom, but the comment occasionally contains a trace of bitterness. Many of these new faces view her as an unwelcome reminder of a past they\u2019d prefer to forget. When they see Marina, it\u2019s like they\u2019re looking at a ghost.<\/p>\n The strongest component of Garcia\u2019s doe-like performance is the way it captures someone in the midst of shedding her adolescence, gingerly trying on adulthood. Over the course of a few days, this bashful teen, always armed with her camcorder and far less free-spirited than her cousins, will be beset by her father\u2019s feuding family. Silently observing the passive-aggressive maelstrom, Marina will receive an intense immersion in what her life might have been like if he\u2019d lived.<\/p>\n But she quickly realizes that their memories of the man are far from perfect. No one can decide exactly where Alfonso lived in Vigo. And, more troublingly, Marina\u2019s belief that he died in 1987 is contradicted by relatives, who insist that it was five years later. If Marina has that information wrong, what else does she not know?<\/p>\n \u201cRomer\u00eda\u201d is hardly the first film in which an impressionable soul goes on the hunt for the parents she never had. Likewise, viewers will not be startled when Marina eventually discovers painful secrets about her mom and dad that cause her to reconsider those phantom figures.<\/p>\n Sim\u00f3n, who undertook a similar odyssey at the same age, never allows this delicate story to succumb to self-indulgence or an inflated sense of its own importance. Instead, her film is suffused with a rich, casual immediacy. Sim\u00f3n and her star bracingly recall the electricity of youth as Marina prepares for life as an artist. The movie, in part, is about how she finds her voice.<\/p>\n Sim\u00f3n\u2019s films favor naturalism and \u201cRomer\u00eda\u201d leaves ample room for Spain\u2019s seaside beauty and glorious sunshine. The calming locales both complement and contradict the plot\u2019s revelations, which are hardly bombshells but do speak to how well-to-do families labor to shove inconvenient skeletons into the closet. If anything, Marina will be more shocked by her grandparents (Jos\u00e9 \u00c1ngel Egido and Marina Troncoso), whose fiercely icy demeanor suggests this teenager should consider herself lucky not to have grown up around them.<\/p>\n Because \u201cRomer\u00eda\u201d is a coming-of-age story, Marina will be tempted by cute boys; she\u2019ll also begin to display a rebellious streak. As the picture rolls along, Garcia shows a more assertive side, relishing her character\u2019s emergence from her shell. But this modest saga saves its biggest surprise for its final reels, when the narrative folds in on itself beguilingly, allowing Marina to relate to her mom and dad in ways she never had before. Maybe we can never truly know our parents, but if we\u2019re lucky, we can gain the maturity to one day see them in ourselves.<\/p>\n ‘Romer\u00eda’<\/p>\n In Spanish, Catalan, Galician and French, with subtitles<\/p>\n Not rated<\/p>\n Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes<\/p>\n Playing: Opens Wednesday, July 1, at Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Glendale<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Early in \u201cRomer\u00eda,\u201d the film\u2019s main character, Marina, is asked by some children if she\u2019s ever seen the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":774839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,852,274863,44432,1554,32480,75723,274866,10400,13051,14399,337,274864,270604,115082,274865,2535],"class_list":["post-774838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-family","tag-father-alfonso","tag-few-year","tag-film","tag-garcia","tag-ghost","tag-late-parent","tag-life","tag-marina","tag-mom","tag-movies","tag-paternal-grandparent","tag-romeria","tag-simon","tag-vigo","tag-way"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}