The hum of a refrigerator, the distant drone of a neighbor’s lawnmower, the tinny bleeping of a vintage Gameboy, the rhythmic creak of trampoline springs in action. Secondary noise fills scene after scene in “Blue Heron,” a film one might otherwise think to describe as quiet. The dialogue, much of it pained and pointed, sticks too. But Sophy Romvari‘s graceful, singularly heartsore debut feature has a sharp understanding of how memories form and age: Often it’s the incidental, ambient details you recall as vividly as the more significant events at hand.
That understanding is vital to a film built from Romvari’s memories of growing up in an immigrant household on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s, though “Blue Heron” is no standard coming-of-age memoir. Perspectives are shifted, swapped and imagined, in pursuit of the lost, unknowable experience of the filmmaker’s late brother. Fictionalized storytelling and documentary technique are collapsed into each other; so, eventually, are past and present.
Yet if the film blurs the borders of reality, it does so to identify and confront hard, still-wounding truths, extending ideas and personal baggage addressed in Romvari’s acclaimed, widely streamed documentary short “Still Processing.” Grief tangles with lingering frustration over a mental illness that was never satisfactorily named or treated. Premiering in Locarno ahead of its North American debut in Toronto, this is imaginative, emotionally acute filmmaking that deserves to break out of the festival circuit.
“It’s better like this, to keep it separate,” says the flustered mother (Iringó Réti) of eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven, an expressive and wonderfully unaffected newcomer), gently refusing the girl’s request for a friend to come to dinner. For Sasha’s parents, who emigrated from Hungary to Canada with their four children a few years ago, compartmentalization is key to fitting in. Already self-conscious that their immigrant status makes them stand out in a small suburban community, their wish to conform is further complicated by the presence of Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the mother’s teenage son from a previous relationship: Aloof and taciturn, his gaze rarely meeting others’ from behind heavy glasses, his behavior has lately slid from erratic to antisocial, even criminal. Attempts by his mother and stepfather (Adam Tompa) to communicate with him are fruitless; various therapists and special schools have likewise come to naught.
While her mother is trying to protect her from social embarrassment, Sasha sees no shame in her brother’s strangeness. “Blue Heron” — titled for a stolen trinket that Jeremy, in a moment of offhand sweetness, gives his younger sister — is attentive to the limits of childhood comprehension, but also to its generous acceptance of those limits.
As Jeremy’s elders fret over how to reach him, Sasha concedes a degree of distance, echoed in the discreet long-lens shooting style favored by Romvari and cinematographer Maya Bankovic: Jeremy is watched across rooms and through picture windows, his personal space never quite entered or cracked, for better or worse. Sporadic zooms gives proceedings the air of vintage home video, though tighter images, in this case, aren’t necessarily more intimate: In a remarkably contained performance, all darting eyes and twitching features, Beddoes seems to internally recede the closer we get to him.
If it weren’t already obvious that Sasha is a proxy for the director’s childhood self, the parallel is stressed in the film’s second half — which initially disorientates us by leaping forward 20 years, and introduces the adult Sasha (now played by Amy Zimmer) as a filmmaker probing her brother’s sadly curtailed life, seeking any additional insight that may have eluded her in her youth. It’s hard to come by. A group consultation with real-life social workers given Jeremy’s old case files suggests that, despite changes in practice, it would be as difficult to diagnose or treat him today as it was in the 1990s. That may or may not be a comfort.
When Sasha imagines herself, meanwhile, in the shoes of a social worker attending to the family back then, the film’s axis of time and reality is drastically and devastatingly shifted. Incomplete memories are supplemented with that poignant identification we gain with our parents when we ourselves reach adulthood — the realization that our trusted guardians at no point knew everything. That rite-of-passage dawning hits harder than usual in light of the tragedy awaiting the family. It’s a tricky structural coup, executed with crisp economy by Romvari and editor Kurt Walker, that braids past, present and the suggestion of future healing. “I wish I had a better answer,” Sasha tells her parents in this guise, speaking for all parties who couldn’t save Jeremy — and for herself too, as even this exquisitely perceptive and empathetic film still can’t read him.