\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he past folds into the present in this very fine debut feature from Canadian film-maker Sophy Romvari, which has grown in my mind on a second viewing, having first come across it at last year\u2019s Locarno film festival. It is an autobiographical, in fact autofictional, movie imbued with a kind of quietism, a refusal to amplify its real-life drama and tragedy. It doesn\u2019t orchestrate its agony in the Hollywood style but almost confides it to the viewer, intimately and sotto voce.<\/p>\n Sombre and painful, complex yet unshowy, Blue Heron is built metatextually on two levels that boldly collapse into each other in a very striking final coup de cin\u00e9ma, yet Romvari\u2019s sophistication doesn\u2019t stop this being subtly moving. The subject is her own childhood and her relationship with her deeply troubled older brother; it is developed from her award-winning 2020 short film on the subject, entitled Still Processing, whose existence is now unselfconsciously built into this new work.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n It is the mid-90s and a little girl called Sasha (Eylul Guven), about 7 or 8 years old, lives with her two brothers and older teen half-brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) on Vancouver Island. They have just arrived at their new house, having previously moved around a lot for reasons we shall soon learn. Their mum and dad, played by Iring\u00f3 R\u00e9ti and \u00c1d\u00e1m Tompa, are Hungarian and switch to the mother tongue when they don\u2019t want the kids to know what they are saying.<\/p>\n Emotionally, they are all at breaking point. Jeremy is deeply troubled, with a behavioural condition that one child psychiatrist identifies as oppositional defiant disorder, which means he refuses to cooperate with his parents\u2019 increasingly desperate requests. He behaves destructively and dangerously, threatening to burn the house down, and is often brought home by the police in handcuffs.<\/p>\n <\/span>Insidiously gendered dysfunction \u2026 Eylul Guven as Sasha and Iring\u00f3 R\u00e9ti as her mother in Blue Heron.<\/span><\/p>\n The resulting family dysfunction is insidiously gendered; Sasha is upset by Jeremy\u2019s behaviour in a way that her brothers aren\u2019t, and their mother is furious that she has to be the bad cop. She is the one who has to discipline Jeremy and generally deal with him while her husband retreats into his work, and she perhaps resents the unspoken assumption that Jeremy is her burden because he is her son from a previous relationship. What has caused Jeremy\u2019s condition? It is a baffling, insoluble mystery that wounds Sasha as a child and even more so as an adult \u2013 a film-maker played in flashforward scenes by New York writer and comic Amy Zimmer. She is seen videoing a quasi-fictional panel of social workers discussing Jeremy as a cold case.<\/p>\n What is the meaning of Jeremy\u2019s disruption? Does it make sense to wonder about its cause or should we instead be focusing on what Jeremy has caused in other people? Edik Beddoes plays him with a disquietingly opaque, smug smirk; does it mask a deep fear and unhappiness? Or does it mask nothing at all? What is so painful for Sacha, and surely for the film-maker herself, is that she has to negotiate her feelings of hurt and even rage at Jeremy for causing this lasting unhappiness \u2013 and conversely her hurt and rage on his behalf, at the society and social services that did not provide enough support, and a universe that suddenly, inexplicably afflicted him and the whole family with this terrible trauma. An intelligent, valuable piece of film-making.<\/p>\n Blue Heron is in UK and Irish cinemas from 26 June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The past folds into the present in this very fine debut feature from Canadian film-maker Sophy Romvari, which has grown in my mind on a second viewing, having first come across it at last year\u2019s Locarno film festival. It is an autobiographical, in fact autofictional, movie imbued with a kind of quietism, a refusal to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[5195,133,318,6768,24848,1394,15968,1085,24849,22590,2114],"class_list":{"0":"post-50649","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-1990s","9":"tag-blue","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-childhood","12":"tag-heron","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-portrait","15":"tag-review","16":"tag-sombre","17":"tag-sophisticated","18":"tag-trauma"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}