By Peter Keough

Carla Simón’s dreamlike family drama merges mother and daughter, past and present, in a moving search for identity.

Romería. Directed by Carla Simón. At the Coolidge Corner Theatre, July 3  through 9.

Llúcia Garcia Torras in a scene from Romera. Photo: MK2

Time travel, along with a melding of the identities of parent and child, has proven to be an unlikely but effective device in films ranging from Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021) to Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985). Though murkier than those two, Carla Simón’s autobiographical Romería (the title is a Spanish term for a Catholic pilgrimage) engages more deeply with the elusiveness of identity, the legacy of the past, and the entanglements of family ties.

The narrative opens abruptly and at first confusingly with video images of a couple on a sailboat and a diary entry dated 1983 (taken from the diary of the director’s mother) recited in voiceover. In it, Rosalia (the debut of Llúcia Garcia Torras, who looks like a young Linda Ronstadt and is bravura in a challenging dual role) relates her optimistic expectations for her life together with her lover Alfonso in the Spanish seaside city of Vigo.

Then there follows another entry from a different diary dated 2004, from Marina (also Garcia Torras), a 18-year-old orphan raised by her mother Rosalia’s family in Barcelona. In it, she explains how she has to track down members of her late father Alfonso’s family, her grandparents in particular, to clarify discrepancies in the official records regarding her family if she is to qualify for a scholarship to film school. For example, why do the ledgers list her father’s death as happening in the wrong year and assert that he had no children?

The initial disorientation, caused by this jarring juxtaposition of timelines, proves to be intentional. As the daughter approaches the truth about her parents’ history, and her diary entries alternate with those of her mother, the two begin to merge until, in the film’s magical realist penultimate act, they inhabit the same frame. But first, armed with the diary and some snapshots, Marina must make a pilgrimage to Vigo to track down her father’s family.

There she is welcomed enthusiastically by her uncles and aunts and a host of sometimes rowdy cousin. She proceeds to make herself at home in the yacht in which one family lives (part of the nautical motif that persists throughout the film, beginning with Marina’s name). However, they are hesitant about bringing her to visit her grandparents.

Meanwhile, some disquieting contradictions emerge. As she “snoops” (as a cousin accuses her) and questions her new-found family, she hears a rumor that her father had been hidden away in his grandparents’ attic in his final days. Her aunt, a designer of wedding gowns, makes a dress for Marina out a red shirt her father wore, but she also warns her cousins to keep their distance because of her “bad blood.” At last Marina meets her grandparents, and her grandfather offers her an envelope stuffed with euros, saying it will pay for her tuition, rendering further investigation into the past unnecessary.

Outraged, Marina finally rebels. Wearing the red dress, she follows a clever cat (Orión) who’s seen it all, a familiar to two generations, who leads her down to the waterfront where she boards a dinghy and rows it into the past. Most of the last, dreamlike third of the movie enters the post-Franco, early Almodovar early ’80s era in Spain. Newfound freedoms came at a cost: heroin and AIDS took their toll in an orgy of youthful passion, boundless creativity, poor judgement, and self-destruction. Simón depicts this outpouring of debauchery, desire, and ardent self-expression with compassion and a measure of admiration, especially in a disco scene that is like a combination of A Ghost Story (2017), the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut (1999 ), and line dancing.

With Garcia Torras playing both her and her mother, Marina fully merges with the latter. (Mitch, cast as both her hunky cousin and her father, only heightens the film’s faintly incestuous undertones.) Though Marina neither drinks nor smokes and is labeled a “goody-goody” by a cousin, she remains open to her parents’ follies, attuned to their ideals, exuberance, and capacity for love. In the end, she reconciles past and future alike, a harmony achieved through the film’s artful and ardent “romería.”

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He was the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, including Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).