The first hour of Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron feels like the sort of hazy, meditative coming-of-age story you’ve seen before. It’s about the mystery and uncertainty of childhood, about long, sticky summer days and nights that are so still they’re almost unsettling. And then certain unusual details start to stick out to us, and we realize this seemingly gentle mood piece is really about a family in turmoil.
It’s set over a few languid months in the late 1990s, when two Hungarian immigrants (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) and their four kids relocate to Vancouver Island. They move onto a sleepy, tree-lined suburban street, with a nature preserve just a short drive away.
There’s tension building, which we first notice when the parents talk about visiting a child psychologist. The oldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), is acting out in strange ways. He drapes himself over the front steps, pretending to be dead for hours at a time. Then the cops bring him home after he’s been caught shoplifting.
The film is told mostly through the eyes of one of the family’s young daughters, Sasha, who can sense that something is wrong even if she can’t put words or reasoning to it. But the movie also has an overwhelming empathy for her parents: They’re already unmoored from moving to a new country and embedding themselves in a culture they don’t quite understand, and they don’t know what to do about a son who does nothing but disobey them.
As Jeremy’s outbursts get more and more volatile, the atmosphere in the house shifts. And then there’s another sudden shift, this time in the equilibrium of the film itself. Romvari’s screenplay jumps ahead in time, and we see Sasha as an adult (Amy Zimmer), now working as a documentarian and reflecting on the missing pieces and dangling threads of her childhood. It’s as if the second half of the movie is a critical study of the first half.
Blue Heron is a film of impeccable atmosphere. It floats through adolescent memories — some good, some bad — and tries to piece them together with adult logic. It reminded me of Lucretia Martel’s Argentinian film La Ciénaga, also about a family unraveling during an otherwise lazy summer, which makes you feel as if you’re baking in the sun along with the characters.
Blue Heron is Romvari’s feature directorial debut, expanded from an autobiographical documentary short called Still Processing. That’s what this movie is ultimately about, and it’s unusual as a millennial period piece in that it’s less concerned with the details of its era than with the aura of it. It’s really about a filmmaker looking back on her childhood, on a fixed moment in time that she only sort of understood then. But even with hindsight and knowledge, she still doesn’t find answers to all her questions.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.