Filming Memory: Romería and Just an Illusion

Today at the cinema, Romería, by Carla Simón, a very beautiful film selected at Cannes last year, tells the story of a search: an orphan girl meets her paternal family for the first time and reconstructs necessarily troubled, necessarily biased memories, thanks to fiction, dreams, and cinema. Also, the film by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, Just an Illusion, which will be released next week, tells the mixed memories of their two childhoods in the 80s: different backgrounds, very different genres, but one informs the other, about what accuracy and reconstruction are: a perilous cinematic operation.

So Carla Simón is a Spanish filmmaker who works with autobiographical material. Her parents both died when she was very young, and at eighteen she met her paternal family for the first time in Vigo, Galicia, a bourgeois and conservative family that had largely hidden away this double painful death: a consequence of drug use and AIDS, a particularly virulent epidemic in Spain in the late 80s and early 90s, during the Movida period where youth liberated themselves from religious and family constraints, but sometimes paid a high price.

The film is very beautiful because it faithfully follows the impressions of its main character: through her, we hear snippets of conversations, we discover the customs of Galicia where her parents lived a bohemian and chaotic life, but also the bourgeois house where her father grew up, of which all trace or photograph has been eliminated. The shame of this “disease,” as mentioned by its name – AIDS – only at the fortieth minute of the film, has dug its insidious hole, which the protagonist tries to fill, not so much through investigation – rather futile – but through dreams and fantasies, partly erotic, giving the film a dreamlike texture, miles away from what a flashback or reconstruction could be.

I thought while watching Romería of all this recent French literature that floods our shelves. Investigations into a mother, I think of Adèle Yon – a novel about a feminine genealogy – I think of Mauvignier; these books succeed precisely because they do not seek precision or documentation, but rather balance and uncertainty – it is often there, paradoxically, that we reach a true impression of the past, of childhood memories.

The film by Nakache and Toledano, dedicated to the two fathers of the two directors, offers exactly the opposite option, seizing their family memory to create a comical chronicle of a boy from the Parisian suburbs on the eve of his bar mitzvah in the 80s, a boy who resembles them: the story is full of references, songs, radio jingles and TV shows, shoulder pads, and big glasses. Just an Illusion is a pleasant film, but expected, as it fetishizes its era so much that what it stages is less the uniqueness of memory than its transformation into a vintage product. Here are two ways of filming memory, each effective in its own way.