Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari’s debut feature, the luminous Blue Heron, is revelatory—even as it intentionally offers no revelations.
If you saw Romvari’s 2020 short film Still Processing (all her shorts are on the Criterion Channel), you’ve observed the director’s careful application of context, bringing the audience to understand the extent of her family’s grief without divulging many details. Grief, after all, fits no narrative, no timeline with a clear beginning and end. Knowing exactly what happened rarely does anything for the grief-stricken but imply that grief is little more than an informational matter.
All we know is that two of her three brothers have died, David in 2010 and the oldest, Jonathan, in 2014, but why or how is never uttered. The most Romvari admits is that she wishes she could have been closer to David and less angry with Jonathan.
Romvari comes from a lineage of filmmakers—her father studied cinematography in Hungary before immigrating to Canada and her grandfather, József Romvári, was a production designer and art director on more than 60 Hungarian films—and in Still Processing she receives a box of negatives, stills, and personal visual ephemera from her parents. With that box comes the unspoken permission to make Still Processing itself.
The title of the short is as literal a title as it is obvious: the filmmaker plays herself as she processes the film rolls. Mulling over machines in a dark room, bending over light tables with magnifying glasses, and even carrying the box on the subway become inseparable from her grief, as if in the calisthenic acts of developing the stock her body must find ways to continue doing the mundane, moving through this world despite the ineffable pain. Through this “processing” she gives the memory of her two brothers, now gone, physical depth—a life in this world—once again.
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Blue Heron further unearths that physical depth. Taking place in the late ’90s, the film begins with young Sasha (Eylul Guven) moving to Vancouver Island with her family, all of whom seem to closely resemble Romvari’s own family, but with aliases: Mother (Iringo Reti), Father (Adam Tompa), middle brothers Henry (Liam Serg) and Felix (Preston Drabble) who are so near in age they practically operate as twins, and oldest brother Jeremy (Erik Beddoes), a gangly teenager whose face is half covered by thick eye-glasses.
Throughout the initial summer, the family settles into the neighborhood, but Jeremy’s aloofness begins to manifest more and more dangerously, first in stealing, then in disappearing, and then in increasingly putting himself at risk: climbing onto the roof or shattering a window with his fist. While her parents struggle to find help for her brother, Sasha bears witness to these situations that she can barely figure out. Her father captures, with camcorder and his camera full of black and white film, the family’s lives in moments that one might imagine Sasha would find later in a box of pictures and recordings her parents have kept for decades.
Romvari and cinematographer Maya Bankovic lock into Sasha’s youthful perspective for the film’s first half, positioning the audience’s view at eye level with their eight-year-old subject, reveling in the textures and sounds of a child’s summer vacation.
Stringy, sprinkler-drenched hair and the distant hum of lawnmowers occupy our eyes and ears; the din of buzzing insects or the scuff of sandals against concrete while playing hopscotch conjure up whispered sense-recollection while family drama emerges just outside Sasha’s understanding.
In intimate, handheld gestures—via close-ups and docudrama-like vignettes—Blue Heron’s first half weaves in and out of our characters’ personal space like a John Cassavetes film, as if Romvari and Bankovic hope to render Sasha’s memories viscerally in a vein similar to A Woman Under the Influence. Steeped in naturalism and incredible foley work, the film becomes rapt with the tension between what could happen in a cinematic melodrama like this and what young Sasha actually sees happening, any real answers locked behind her silent older brother’s mischievous blue eyes.
And then, as the family’s crisis comes to a narrative climax, Blue Heron transforms, skipping forward decades. Adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer) is making a film about her troubled brother and having the same conversations over the phone with her parents that they were having with Jeremy’s counselors. She speaks to people who knew him, scouts locations on Vancouver island, and convenes a panel of social workers and mental health professionals to ask, in retrospect, what they would have done all those years ago. She takes moments to weep but also to make breakfast, to say good morning to her long-haired dachshund.
The closer Sasha tries to get to the truth of her own experience, the more the film collapses in on itself. As if she’s on set, through movie-making Sasha is able to literally revisit her past, make her young self giggle, endure teenage Jeremy’s glowering looks, and speak to her younger parents all to better grasp what happened against the shadow of what she remembers. But even those memories, however metaphysical, are constructed, with actors playing facsimiles of real people.
Much of the power of what Romvari accomplishes comes from her cast, an ensemble with such pitch-perfect chemistry and total lack of pretension that, unaffected and effortlessly, they seem to show Romvari and Bankovic how to create these decades-old memories in real time. Beddoes as Jeremy, especially, is formidably restrained. A twitch of his jaw speaks volumes.
According to the director, Blue Heron is not a reenactment of her childhood. It’s more an allusion or an interpretation. Many details are drastically different or subverted; the film only focuses on one troubled brother, who is, like any memory, distorted by the ways he’s frozen in time. Does Sasha recall the day her brother came home in handcuffs because it was traumatizing or because her dad handed her the camcorder as he left to confront the police on their doorstep?
Storytelling, and especially movies, encourages us to look for answers amidst crisis. A biopic insists that famous people have reasons for their actions; a family drama roots out the origins of pain for cause and effect. But Blue Heron knows that grief has no conclusion, no pat hero’s journey.
Instead, Romvari excavates the pain of her family’s trauma, not to reveal a hidden, impossible answer to their grief, but to realize what is actually possible—to remember and to keep remembering. And in that way Romvari makes something intensely personal for her feel just as personal for its audience, whether what happened to her happened to them or not. What a revelation that is.
Blue Heron opens at Living Room Theaters, 341 SW 10th, Thurs May 7, 91 minutes, not rated.
