Photo: Janus Films/Everett Collection
Blue Heron is an autobiographical film pulled directly out of writer-director Sophy Romvari’s childhood, from the period when her parents, both Hungarian immigrants, moved their family of six into a new house on Vancouver Island. But what it really feels like is a séance, a way of using cinema not just to put the past onscreen but to commune with it — to interrogate it for information that her younger self was unable to grasp at the time. It’s a tender but devastating work that exists in the netherworld between documentary and fiction, where the innate artificiality of re-creating something that actually happened allows a filmmaker to get to a greater truth. For Asmae El Moudir in The Mother of All Lies, that meant using miniatures to coax out details of her family’s experiences during Morocco’s brutal Years of Lead. For Joshua Oppenheimer in The Act of Killing, having two unabashed death-squad leaders reenact some of the murders they committed under Suharto seems to force the men to reconsider their participation in politically sanctioned mass slaughter.
For Romvari, in her feature debut, enlisting actors to play her family members and both her 8-year-old and adult selves allows her to apply a more mature perspective to a child’s remembrances of the stretch of time right before her troubled elder half-brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), is first sent away to live somewhere else. But it also allowed her to ask herself whether there’s any amount of information that would provide closure or a sense of resolution. “It’s true I spent most of my life being angry at him,” the adult Sasha, played by Amy Zimmer, murmurs in voice-over. “The older I get, the more I feel like I never even knew him at all. My image of him now, I know, falls flat compared to reality.” We have nothing to compare those images to, but that estimation doesn’t remotely do justice to the lush tangibility of the ’90s Canadian summer Romvari unfolds onscreen, one marked by a kid’s sense of days that stretch on forever.
Young Sophy — named Sasha (Eylul Guven) in the film — gets absorbed into a group of neighborhood girls with the effortlessness of children. She submits to an application of sunscreen by her mother (Iringó Réti) while at the beach. She and her father (Ádám Tompa), an amateur photographer, watch as Felix (Preston Drabble) and Henry (Liam Serg), her middle brothers, float origami boats in the kitchen sink while Jeremy rains powdered sugar on top of the scene like snow. At first, Jeremy — tall and lanky, his blond hair flopping over a pair of wire-rimmed aviator glasses — is just part of this domestic tapestry, a young man who exudes some standard-issue teenage moodiness and desires to act out but who’s still very much part of the family. The indications that something more serious is going on come slowly, from the afternoon in which he sprawls out as if dead on the doorstep to the time he vanishes on a day trip, leaving his mother to search worriedly in the rain before eventually finding him at a gas station down the road. “What do you think about Jeremy, how he’s behaving?” the woman asks Sasha at one point, and the little girl, consumed with winding her long brown hair around a finger, answers blithely, “I don’t know.”
It’s the query of a parent wondering how much her younger children have been picking up about there being something different and increasingly disruptive about their elder sibling, who’ll later be brought home by the police for shoplifting, who’ll commit an act of self-harm, and who’ll have to be talked down when he impulsively and alarmingly turns up on the roof of the house one day. But it’s also a question that Sasha’s mother has clearly asked of many people, including child psychologists and other professionals, as she searches for a diagnosis in hopes that it would offer a way forward into some form of treatment. Blue Heron is rich with details that feel like direct flashes of memory — filling water balloons from a house in the yard, learning to make potato pancakes with her mother, drawing a mouse in Microsoft Paint with her father — but also with scenes that Sasha wasn’t present for, that come from Romvari’s imagination, as she filled in exchanges that she couldn’t have seen.
Some of these sequences offer nuances a child wouldn’t grasp, especially when it comes to the dynamic between her father, perpetually doing unspecified work on a computer in the living room, and her mother, who shoulders more of the responsibility for keeping the kids entertained and cleaning up after them. But it’s when the movie takes a leap into the present and shows us Sasha, as a filmmaker, presenting Jeremy’s case files to a set of social workers to see what they would have done differently, that Blue Heron becomes something truly masterful. The film is not just a means of trying to understand if there was some better possible outcome but also a fantasy of opening up the past and slipping back inside it to see what you missed when you were there.
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