Blue Heron movie review: A filmmaker remembers her troubled brother in an effective impressionistic drama

In the 2018 movie The storydirector Jennifer Fox explores childhood trauma by casting herself at various ages, including the role of an adult film director. It’s a fascinating, unnerving piece of meta-filmmaking, examining the limits of memory with an almost newsworthy curiosity. Canadian director Sophie Rumvari does something similar in the new film Blue herona semi-autobiographical piece whose structure revolves around itself, blending fact and fiction into a sad portrait of a family tragedy. However, it has a softer touch than Fox’s film, and in that way perhaps obscures too much.

The film begins sometime in the late 1990s. A family of five—three brothers, one sister, and their Hungarian immigrant parents—move to a new home near the coast of British Columbia. This seems to be a harmonious enough occasion; The house has light and space, and life seems to settle into a comfortable rhythm. Young Sasha (Eulul Guven) is the only daughter, perhaps a little lost in the raging storm of her brothers, but she soon finds friends in the neighborhood, and embarks on a summer full of small adventures and discoveries.

But before long, we discover a disturbance. Sasha’s older brother, Jeremy (Edic Bedos), has entered a serious phase of adolescence — or perhaps something worse. He is isolated and stubborn, and seems deaf to his parents as they try to convince him to return to the family fold. He walks away from a family trip to the beach and barely reacts to his mother’s anger and dismay when she finally finds him loitering at a gas station after hours. Other increasingly erratic and reckless behaviors ensue, as we watch the parents have fraught, silent conversations about what to do with their troubled son.

Romvari drifts between points of view. At times we are only privy to what Sasha hears, at other moments we fly close to Mom (Eringo Riti) and Dad (Adam Tomba) as their marriage strains. He, a kind of artist and photographer, has a tendency to check in, only turning up at the rare moments when Jeremy is in a brighter, friendlier mood. This parental dichotomy may be complicated by the fact that Jeremy is the son of the mother’s first marriage; Caring for his adoptive father There can be a certain distance between men.

But such contributing factors to Jeremy’s distress are only minimally induced Blue heronwhich is mostly concerned with creating a precise sense of mood and place, particularly a vaguely remembered childhood outing. Romvari brilliantly brings together this kind of daily flux, days that bleed into each other as something important that arouses on the margins of everyday life. The film is at times reminiscent of an Alfonso Cuaron film Romewhich did a similarly compelling job of evoking the tones and textures of a life remembered fragmentarily, with both fondness and pain.

Blue heron It takes on a more forceful intent about halfway through, as Rumvari moves to the present day, when Sasha (played by Amy Zimmer) has grown up and is doing some sort of investigation into her brother’s gradual separation from the family. Sasha, like Rumvari, is a filmmaker, and is working on a project that involves interviewing social workers who have just reviewed the case of her brother, who is now decades old. Romvari weaves some documentary into the picture. These social workers, including the one who worked directly with her family, are real people. Their voices add crucial objectivity to Rumvari’s memories. Here are the plain facts of the matter: unadorned, and honest in their way.

if Blue heron He is ever critical of the system that failed Jeremy, and he is only subtly so. The film exists mostly as an exercise in continuing to till the personal ground that Romvari has previously traversed in her short films. Sometimes, especially at the end of this fleeting 90 minutes, I wanted something more interesting. Rumvari chose to tell us what happened to Jeremy (in very light detail) rather than show us in any real way. It is not difficult to understand why this decision was made, even though the subject is sensitive for the director. But the shift to something like explicit education is happening Blue heron I feel like it’s lighter than it should be. We go through Sasha’s past and then simply get a faint summary of what happened next. The film’s built-up emotional weight quickly dissipates when it reaches its abrupt end.

still, Blue heron It is an impressive and promising feature for the first time. Rumvari cleverly uses the stunning landscape of the area surrounding Vancouver to give her film some cinematic heft. Her musical choices, both melancholic and dreamy, also add a sense of importance. Retí’s is a standout performance, convincingly charting a mother’s resolve that crumbles under a growing sense of helplessness upon watching her child disappear into a mystery. One hopes to be reunited with her later in the story, but Romvari keeps the mother firmly in the past. Which may be a sad indicator of what these unfortunate events did to every member of her family. But Ramvari does not give us any details about this; Maybe some of the story is just for her.