Blue Heron is the debut feature from Canadian director Sophy Romvari, but it’s hardly the work of an inexperienced filmmaker. Romvari has been making acclaimed short films for more than a decade, and given the autobiographical nature of the new movie, she’s clearly been working toward this for a while.
Still, it is her first feature, and it’s an astonishing one. Its story is told by Sasha, initially with a voiceover tipping us off to the fact that what we’re seeing comes from her memories, from when she was a girl living in Canada with her Hungarian immigrant family, which includes her troubled older brother. From what we see, that brother doesn’t often seem more difficult than any angsty teenager, but we hear the adults around him talk about much worse behavior, words and actions that become frightening. We also know that everything we’re seeing is filtered through Sasha’s memories, and Romvari’s style underscores that perfectly, with an airy, impressionistic approach that includes pieces of scenes and flitting images of faces watching and shadows dancing on walls.
We’re surprised, then, when we shift in time and the film’s style changes dramatically, and we discover we’re in the present, with Sasha looking back—or at least this is true until her current life and her memories begin to blur, and the film becomes one of the best depictions I can remember of the actual processing of painful experiences and feelings, and of the maintenance and creation of memory itself. When we sit here and think back, we’re putting ourselves in another time and place, but we’re doing that as the people we are now, and that has a deep effect on the way we work out what we remember, or think we remember. And whether it’s intentional or not, and it probably is, Romvari also teases our own memories, as viewers, and drops in images that may call up something for us, too: A black door being painted red. A woman peeling potatoes.
There are times you finish watching a movie and you can do little more than to stare into the distance, because at that moment, and for some time after, almost nothing else exists. Blue Heron is undoubtedly one of the best movies of the year.
