Movies are a time machine, allowing us to revisit, reexamine, and tap into the events and sensations of the past, and in Blue Heron, the camera is a conduit for returning to a fraught childhood in search of answers, understanding, and peace.
A semi-autobiographical tale that’s as deft and delicate as it is emotionally overpowering, writer/director Sophy Romvari’s debut—screening Sept. 9 at the Toronto International Film Festival—is a subtle, self-referential wonder of a memory piece, recounting the ordeal of a 1990s family through the eyes of its youngest member, who’s destined, in the future, to seek solace via cinematic means.
Heartbreaking barely begins to describe it, although the terms masterful and transcendent also apply.
Blue Heron is a story relayed through half-glimpsed sounds and sights that are akin to recollections. Everything in Romvari’s film is both intensely intimate and just out of reach, and that’s similarly how Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa’s Hungarian immigrant parents feel about teenage Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the mother’s eldest child from a first marriage.
With blonde hair, big glasses, and a disposition that’s placidly cold and unreadable, Jeremy is a bomb waiting to detonate. Though his two brothers seem somewhat oblivious to what’s taking place, his adolescent sister Sasha (Eylul Guven)—a clear stand-in for Romvari—is aware that her mother’s pained countenance, and her father’s oblique query “What did she say?” to his wife, are related to the tumult that he’s causing.
Moving into a new Vancouver abode in the ’90s, Sasha’s clan is in quiet crisis, and Romvari’s camera gently bobs, weaves, and pans around the house’s inhabitants to deeply embed us in this time, place, and unit.
Augmenting that impression is an enveloping soundscape of redolent noises—rustling wind, plinking xylophone keys, clanking feet on metal staircases, laughing kids—and action comprised of what appear to be stolen moments.
The director draws viewers close to her material, and yet at the same time, she filters much of it through glass windows and mirrors, creating a detachment that speaks to her characters’ condition as they grapple with a situation that has no easy resolution, and cope with an individual who continually stymies their attempts to help.
Early audio from a nature program relates that the bond between grown-up herons weakens as their children mature, and certainly, Sasha’s mom and dad are struggling to maintain unity in the face of domestic calamity. The particulars of that misfortune, however, are initially enigmatic in Blue Heron.
Romvari sets her scene through Sasha, who runs off to play hopscotch on a bright summer day with neighboring friends—a get-together that concludes abruptly when she falls onto a swimming pool’s tarp, necessitating a rescue—and comes home to discover that Jeremy is lying motionless on their entranceway’s top step. Sasha is unperturbed by this episode, casually stepping over her brother on the way to the front door. So too, at least on the surface, is her father, who, upon receiving a neighbor’s phone call indicating that the boy is dead on the stoop, casually remarks that he’ll come back to life soon.
Such superficial jokiness, unfortunately, can’t mask Sasha’s mom and dad’s profound fear with regards to Jeremy, who spoils an outing with his siblings to a rocky beach by up and disappearing. He’s later found at a gas station, totally unconcerned about the panic he’s caused his mother, and he behaves similarly when, some weeks later, he’s brought home in handcuffs by a police officer after shoplifting from a local store.
There are rarely fireworks in Blue Heron; its most violent incident involves Jeremy throwing things during a bedroom tantrum and being calmed by a resolute hug from his dad. Nonetheless, the tension is palpable and absorbed by Sasha as she gazes at, and listens through doors to, her parents talking about, and dealing with, their wayward son.
Jeremy is an adrift young man whose fondness for drawing maps suggests he’s trying to counter disorder with order, while Sasha is an innocent putting a puzzle together with only scattered pieces.
Blue Heron dramatizes her process—whose fragmentary nature is aligned with all these characters’ shattered states—in snippets, be it Sasha’s mom telling her that it’s best to not have friends over, or Jeremy waking the family up in the middle of the night by punching a window, resulting in a bloody injury.
Throughout, Sasha’s dad films and snaps pictures, remarking about a developing photograph in a dark room that “time is going backwards. It’s a time warp.” Romvari’s film is as well, and it italicizes that notion when it suddenly, imperceptibly leaps forward multiple decades to witness a now-grown Sasha (Amy Zimmer) listen to old recordings of her mother and, then, meet with a group of social workers (whom she films) to discuss Jeremy’s case.
Both Romvari and her fictional proxy Sasha plumb lingering trauma in Blue Heron, whose breathtaking final sequence involves a melding of memory, projection, and wish-fulfillment.
Imagining herself as simultaneously a potential savior and the social-worker agent of destruction who convinced her mother and father to send Jeremy to a foster home, Sasha reenters a yesteryear that she desperately wants to, but cannot, change.
It’s a fantasy that, in the end, merely underlines her powerlessness. Still, there’s comfort to be found in her impossible reverie; by reliving, first-hand, this most horrible of experiences, Sasha confronts the source of her misery and, in doing so, allows herself a measure of forgiveness for a nightmare not of her own making.
Guilt, regret, shame, and yearning for absolution all commingle in Blue Heron, swirling about each other in ways that aren’t easily reconciled. Romvari conjures a mood that’s hazy but precise, distant but near, and its mixture of despair and hope will be familiar to anyone who longs for a bygone era, and loved one, that remains forever gone.
Ultimately, the film is a story about, and an example of, movies’ ability to accomplish the impossible, freezing the present so, one day, we might be transported back to it. “Thank you for your memories. They’re all I have now,” says Sasha to Jeremy in opening voiceover. With her tremendous first feature, Romvari immortalizes those remembrances so they’re never completely lost.
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