The Coastal Mysteries of “Romería” and “Rose of Nevada”

The movie-release calendar, though often arbitrarily assembled, can sometimes place seemingly unrelated works in meaningful proximity—and in conversation. By what I assume is a happy coincidence, rather than any shrewd connivance on the part of their American distributors, two richly complementary films from overseas have washed ashore this month. Both are coastal affairs, and together they form a most see-worthy midsummer double bill, brought to you by the color blue. “Romería,” from the Catalan director Carla Simón, takes place in and around Vigo, a city on Spain’s northwest shore, where the sun streams down on yachts, swimming pools, and other emblems of a family’s estimable wealth. “Rose of Nevada,” from the English filmmaker Mark Jenkin, trawls the waters near a dour Cornish village, where grotty fishing boats are lashed by torrential rains. Simón’s film is semi-autobiographical; Jenkin’s couldn’t possibly be. And yet both films are mysteries of a sort, predicated on hidden identities, distant tragedies, lost loved ones, and a whimsical element of time travel.

The protagonist of “Romería” is a sensitive, watchful eighteen-year-old, Marina (Llúcia Garcia)—named for the sea, of course, though which one is never made clear. Perhaps the Mediterranean, given that she was raised in Barcelona, by adoptive parents. Then again, maybe the Atlantic, near Vigo, where her biological parents met and fell in love. They were heroin users who died from AIDS when Marina was a young girl; she never met her father, Fon, and has only faint memories of her unnamed mother. When the film begins, in July, 2004, Marina has just arrived in Vigo, where she’s about to meet her relatives on Fon’s side, some of them for the first time. The visit is a matter of necessity: she’s headed to university in the fall, and, in order to secure a scholarship, she needs official acknowledgment of her lineage. For reasons that will take some time to piece together, her grandparents are not keen to recognize her.

Marina plans to study cinema, which is how you know she’s a stand-in for the director. (Simón also fictionalized her childhood in her début feature, “Summer 1993,” which followed a six-year-old girl in the aftermath of her mother’s AIDS-related death.) Early on in “Romería”—the title means “pilgrimage”—Marina stands on the deck of a ferry, aiming a camcorder out at the water. Throughout the film, we see her footage of Vigo and its surroundings, overlaid with audio excerpts from her late mother’s diary—a moving act of artistic communion, meant to bring a woman’s long-ago musings back to life and into the present. “Sometimes it’s calm, blue, peaceful. Sometimes wild, choppy,” her mom wrote of this very sea, viewed from the apartment she shared with Marina’s father. The cool quietude of Simón’s film—scene after scene is gently controlled and briskly observed—gives way just as suddenly to unruly gusts of feeling.