Canadian film-maker Sophy Romvari's debut feature Blue Heron is an autobiographical and autofictional movie imbued with a kind of quietism, refusing to amplify its real-life drama and tragedy. It does not orchestrate its agony in the Hollywood style but almost confides it to the viewer, intimately and sotto voce. The film, which premiered at last year's Locarno film festival, has grown in the mind on a second viewing.
Plot and Characters
Set in the mid-1990s on Vancouver Island, the story follows a little girl called Sasha (Eylul Guven), about 7 or 8 years old, who lives with her two brothers and older teen half-brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes). They have just arrived at their new house, having moved around frequently. Their parents, played by Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa, are Hungarian and switch to their mother tongue when they do not want the children to understand.
Emotionally, the family is at breaking point. Jeremy is deeply troubled with a behavioural condition identified by a child psychiatrist as oppositional defiant disorder, meaning he refuses to cooperate with his parents' increasingly desperate requests. He behaves destructively and dangerously, threatening to burn the house down, and is often brought home by the police in handcuffs.
Family Dysfunction and Gender Roles
The resulting family dysfunction is insidiously gendered. Sasha is upset by Jeremy's behaviour in a way that her brothers are not, and their mother is furious that she has to be the bad cop. She is the one who must discipline Jeremy and generally deal with him while her husband retreats into his work. She perhaps resents the unspoken assumption that Jeremy is her burden because he is her son from a previous relationship.
What has caused Jeremy's condition? It is a baffling, insoluble mystery that wounds Sasha as a child and even more so as an adult. In flashforward scenes, Sasha is played by New York writer and comic Amy Zimmer, who is seen videoing a quasi-fictional panel of social workers discussing Jeremy as a cold case.
Metatextual Structure and Impact
Blue Heron is built metatextually on two levels that boldly collapse into each other in a striking final coup de cinéma. Romvari's sophistication does not stop the film from being subtly moving. The subject is her own childhood and her relationship with her deeply troubled older brother, developed from her award-winning 2020 short film Still Processing, whose existence is now unselfconsciously built into this new work.
According to the review, Edik Beddoes plays Jeremy with a disquietingly opaque, smug smirk that may mask deep fear and unhappiness—or nothing at all. The film explores the painful negotiation of feelings of hurt and rage at Jeremy for causing lasting unhappiness, and conversely, hurt and rage on his behalf at society and social services that did not provide enough support, and a universe that inexplicably afflicted him and the whole family with this terrible trauma.
Release and Significance
Blue Heron is an intelligent, valuable piece of film-making. It is in UK and Irish cinemas from 26 June.
