Blue Heron is a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical film, the debut feature of Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari. It focuses on an 8-year-old girl, Sasha (Eylul Guven), who moves with her family to Vancouver Island. Her parents’ time and attention are largely taken up by their eldest son, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), who behaves dangerously and erratically, and it quickly becomes clear that despite their best efforts and help from therapists and social workers, they are almost at their wits’ end. Iringó Réti, in particular, gives a masterful performance as a controlled whirlwind of chaos, a mother who loves her children but lacks the tools to truly help them, whose worry she struggles to tamp down to try and still be a good mother.
Romvari and cinematographer Maya Bankovic so magically capture the texture of childhood memory. Early on in the film, the family is on an excursion to the beach, and Sasha runs out ahead of her family, and as she looks back, the camera cuts to a shot from her perspective. It’s a perfect encapsulation of revisiting your childhood as an adult—you’re simultaneously inside the memory and outside of it, trying to examine it for something that you’ve missed. As a child, Sasha doesn’t fully understand everything that’s happening, but she’s noticing things, certainly more than her parents expect, as they attempt to maintain a sense of normalcy for the family.
The camera inherits what we understand to be Sasha’s powerlessness. It’s almost a curdled nostalgia, a simultaneous desire for a simpler time paired with the dawning realization that it was only simpler in your mind. The film is a sensory experience, immersing us in Sasha’s world, with the sound mixing a particular standout. There are seemingly inconsequential details that rise insistently to the top of the mix, a background hum that you take for granted until you cannot ignore it any longer.
The camera, and the sense of archiving, of recording, is ever-present in the film. Sasha’s perceptiveness and watchful eye dovetails with her father’s interest in photography, and his insistence on capturing the present for posterity. At one point, he even provides her with a camcorder, and the skills to transform her memories into something more concrete. As he teaches his children to develop photos in a makeshift darkroom, the prints hanging over the washing machine, a character comments that it’s as if time is going backward.
But it only feels that way. The core heartbreak of the film is Kierkegaard’s reminder that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward. As a child, you’re always focusing on the wrong things, the import of a moment only retroactively making sense. The human desire to make art is littered with the desire to change the past, and it is only in the medium of film that we can attempt to bend temporality to our will.
My favourite thing about this film, however, is that it eschews such easy answers. It serves less as a corrective of Romvari’s past than as an acknowledgment of the limitations of this kind of backwards understanding. Midway through the film, Romvari makes an audacious structural gambit that makes clear the limitations of the exercise, yet provides herself, Sasha, and her family the grace to recognize that everyone was simply trying their best.
The film is bookended by a shot of an iPhone camera zooming into the Vancouver Island landscape. The first occurrence provides a seamless transition between the present and a memory, a simple gesture to travel through time, but when it recurs, it feels heartbreaking in its persistence. What Romvari is looking for in the past is doomed to be blurred, just as how it was through the tears in my eyes.
