Past and present magically merge in this emotionally loaded ode to childhood memories
Blue Heron
Starring Eylul Guven, Amy Zimmer, Edik Beddoes & Iringó Réti
Written and directed by Sophy Romvari
Rated PG-13
In limited release Friday, April 24; expanded release May 8
In mythology, the blue heron—an elegant bird that swoops gracefully into the water and then back into the sky—symbolizes a bridge between the physical and the spiritual. It’s an apt metaphor for this impressively crafted, quietly intense, emotionally charged drama seen at first though the eyes of a child, then later re-examined by the young woman she becomes.
We first meet little Sasha (Eylul Guven) when she arrives with her family for a summer retreat on Canada’s Vancouver Island in the 1990s. Sasha has three brothers, and the oldest, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), is a young teen with some pronounced behavioral issues. He’s quiet, sullen and unresponsive, but artistically gifted. And he plays dead on the doorstep, shoplifts from stores and walks across the ridge of the rooftop like it’s a tightrope. His parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompo) worry that he may harm himself, or others.
Sasha takes this all in, so do we. We watch and listen, as she does, as her parents discuss what to do with their teenage son who’s become increasingly hard to manage. Is he “just acting out,” or are there more profound developmental issues? A learning disability? Oppositional-defiant disorder? “He’s troubled,” says his mother, “but he’s not crazy.”
Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari inventively blends past and present, memories and reality, when “adult” Sasha (Amy Zimmer) takes up the story, 20 years down the road, bothered by not knowing what was wrong, exactly, with her brother, or what eventually happened to him. Romvari has noted that Blue Heron is semi-autobiographical, inspired by her own childhood, and the film drops subtle hints at that very connection—with a shot of young Sasha holding her father’s movie camera, or later, grown-up Sasha making a documentary film about her brother. It blends the director’s memories into a movie—about a director making a movie of her memories, and filling in the gaps.
Blue Heron is rich in little details, with the sights and sounds of life. It captures the everyday rhythms of Sasha’s family, giving them calm, almost elegant portent—as the kids play and squabble, the mom peels a potato, or the dad clicks away with his camera. When Sasha and her brothers are on the bed in front of a TV, we know from the sound that they’re absorbed with Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in a Looney Toons cartoon; as grown-up Sasha sits soaking in her bathtub watching an old movie, we can tell from the dialogue it’s Cary Grant’s 1940 screwball newspaper comedy His Girl Friday. Those off-camera audio clues nod to the screwed-up situation with Jeremy that taxed his parents before spiraling out of their control.
At one point, the dad shows his kids the “magic” of how a photograph he’s just taken of them becomes an 8×10 image in his basement darkroom. They watch in wonder and the image slowly materializes, revealing a scene from only moments ago. “Time is going backward,” he tells them.
Time goes backward in Blue Heron, but I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you exactly how. Let’s just say that Sasha gets to re-experience her childhood in a most unique way, one that bridges the physical and the spiritual, the real and the remembered, the mundane and the mystical. It’s about mental health, the magical moments that shape our lives, and moving on.
And like a blue heron, it will swoop into your heart before soaring toward the heavens and leaving you with a song—a very appropriate 1990s tune by Daniel Johnston called “Some Things Last a Long Time.”
Indeed, they do, like childhood memories.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 