Romvari’s impressive debut intertwines past and present in a uniquely constructed film that requires patience then rewards it tenfold.
It is somewhat hard to grasp that you will never truly know the people you love in your life. In Sophy Romvari’s lyrical feature debut Blue Heron she analyses her childhood and beyond through semi-autobiographical memories that bleed into a version of her present self. Not too dissimilar to Aftersun there is a fleeting sense of a person at the centre of the story both acting as the protagonist yet agonisingly impossible to pin down, moments play like scenes of ghosts attempting to understand the sometimes unexplainable and cast a hypnotic, unusual spell.
We follow a Hungarian family having just emigrated to Vancouver, Canada in the late 1990’s and we view the action mainly through the eyes of the youngest daughter Sasha (Eylul Guven). Her father (Ádám Tompa) spends most of the days tapping away, working at his clunky computer but provides a warm presence when he can. Her mother (Iringó Réti) is doing her best with this new situation, she takes on the heavy majority of the childcare for Sasha and her three brothers. Only her older brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) has begun acting out in both subtle and not so subtle ways that has placed the family at a sort of bubbling crisis point. There is a deep lying tension between the family and Jeremy that Romvari masterfully and calmly handles as she attempts to get both the audience and herself to understand through her evocative filmmaking.
The film is split into two distinct parts with the first being an understated examination of life adjusting to a new Country and dealing with ongoing trauma. Sasha and her youngest brothers behave as any kid would, they play with their friends in sprinklers, they spend time at the beach with their mother and they watch tv and goof around. But in an attempt at reconciling with her memory Romvari makes subtle actions like Jeremy repeatedly chucking a basketball at the wall creating a loud, dull thud or lying motionless on the front doorstep feel sometimes unbearably tense and upset the natural balance.
Romvari also knows to keep the film light and uses some excellent perspective shifts through evocative mirror shots and woozy reflections speaking to the loose authenticity of trying to comprehend grief almost unravelling in real time. She never tries to be flashy and the beautiful film cinematography from Maya Bankovic creates a flickering time capsule effect that greatly adds thematic resonance.
Memory is deceiving, especially at Sasha’s age and there is a sense that Jeremy and her parents are more than just the people we see on screen. Réti puts in a great performance as the mother trying to hold everything together, she never panders to melodrama and blames herself in a very human yet heartbreaking way. Beddoes is also brilliant as Jeremy, a nearly mute performance that plays over his features like he’s not really there at all. At times he can be incredibly warm towards his siblings and others we hear that he’s threatened to “burn the house down with everyone in it”. From what we see of Jeremy we don’t think he’d do that, but the chance that he could and his erratic behaviour means that very chance smartly drowns all the beautiful pockets of joy in a horrific possibility. If he keeps acting like this, he’s going to have to be rehomed.
As the film morphs from the perspective of a young mind we are suddenly thrust into a representation of Romvari or Sasha’s adult self played by Amy Zimmer. Here she is older and trying to understand how the lack of support failed Jeremy and the family. The film crucially never explains too much but does slowly reveal details of how it affected both Sasha and her parents later down the line. Jeremy had a complex Oppositional Defiance Disorder causing intense anger and a refusal to play by any rules and mental health experts seem as baffled by it today than they did in the 90’s. It speaks to the marooning isolation these kinds of conditions provide and the ripple effect of trying to understand this can have on the people around them.
The change is so sharp that it does jar the tone initially, but instead of seeking answers Sasha ends up attempting a cathartic, soul cleansing tribute and explanation of the events proceeding their childhood now she’s older and wiser. It doesn’t seek to actually fully explain but through an All of Us Strangers coded gimmick there is evident power in the construction Romvari has so carefully and uniquely conjured from the recesses of her own memory.
4 / 5
A sobering, existential but in many ways uplifting gem, Blue Heron is a film only its creator could have made and offers an imaginative and genuinely new way to explore family dynamics through film.
