Blue Heron

 

Writer/director Sophy Romvari

director on the set

BLUE HERON          B                                                                                                       Hungary  Canada  (90 mi)  2025  d: Sophy Romvari

What drew me to this film, awarded the best debut feature at Locarno and best Canadian feature at the Toronto Film Fest, was the locale, having been to Vancouver Island in the Pacific Northwest, surprisingly at the exact same time frame in the late 90’s as the film, before the prevalence of cellphones and GPS, where one of the highlights was the abundance of indigenous art to be found, especially in the galleries of the small town of Tofino on the western coast, where the ruggedness of the terrain and the enormous Douglas Fir and cedar trees is nothing less than remarkable, growing three times faster near salmon rivers that enrich the soil, while also attracting thousands of eagles and grizzly bears, creating a harmonious blend of nature and wildlife.  This film, however, ignores that entirely and takes place mostly in the urban environment of Nanaimo on the eastern coast overlooking the Georgia Straight, just a ferry’s ride away from Vancouver, though, as is often the case in films, much of it was actually shot in North Vancouver.  Not to be confused with Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka) (2022), this is actually more along the lines of Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), or Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989), but without the artistic firepower, featuring a morose, acutely disturbed teenage boy wreaking emotional havoc on his family, yet initially he just seems like any other moody, disaffected, and self-absorbed teenage kid whose anti-social rebelliousness manifests itself by inappropriately acting out, creating chaos out of nothing, drawing attention to himself and those around him, straining the family dynamic, yet he’s never viewed as a villain, always perceived as just a kid who’s also capable of displaying moments of tenderness.  Loosely diagnosed with “oppositional defiant disorder,” literally rebelling against authority, yet this barely scratches the surface, as intervention fails miserably, leaving the parents in despair, having to deal with an underlying anxiety that permeates their core existence, but leaving them feeling helpless by knowing so little about it, which is only magnified by the children’s inability to understand, knowing something is wrong but not knowing what to do about it, as there was limited knowledge and few available resources to address this kind of situation at the time, eventually recommending placement with a foster family, which lingers like a death in the family.  In reality, Romvari lost two older brothers in early adulthood, both struggling with mental illness, tragedies that may have inspired this film, forged out of grief and love.  Written by the director, shot by Maya Bankovic, subtly told from the point of view of a young 8-year old girl, Sasha (Eylul Guven), she is part of a Hungarian-Canadian family of six who move to British Columbia’s Vancouver Island in the late 90’s, where initially nothing out of the ordinary occurs, establishing a natural rhythm and flow, as characters move in and out of view as we get accustomed to the normal patterns of life, with an introverted photographer husband (Ádám Tompa) who mostly stays out of the fray by burying himself in work on his desktop computer, leaving a beleaguered mother (Iringó Réti) with way too much responsibility looking after the children on her own, leaving her frustrated, at her wit’s end, and emotionally exhausted.  He notably does bring the children into the dark room to develop photographs, as they watch with wonderment at what feels like magic when the images suddenly appear out of nothing.     

As we are lured into their familiar routines, going to the beach, watching cartoons or National Geographic animal episodes, making paper boats in the sink, playing in the sprinkler outside on the lawn, inflating water balloons, spraying one another with the garden hose, or jumping on the trampoline, no one personality stands out, but the oldest teenage boy Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the only child born from the mother’s previous relationship, is much older and towers over the other children, consisting of two boys about the same age as Sasha, but as time goes on he gets to be a handful, never listening to his parents, ignoring them completely while acting suspiciously as his behavior grows more erratic, becoming increasingly dangerous, precariously walking on the roof, breaking windows with his hand, disappearing frequently for long periods of time, remaining aloof and isolated, barely ever uttering a word, with no interactions and no friends to speak of, mostly keeping to himself, viewed at the time as a “problem child,” a loaded expression from the 90’s.  Loosely based on her own immigrant experience, drawing upon her own family life, as her parents and three brothers all moved from Hungary to British Columbia a year before she was born, the director has been making short documentaries since 2011 before making her first feature, which enlarges the canvas, yet there’s an understated quietness to the film, filled with distance and space between incidents, where it’s not about narrative coherence but establishing an interior mood in a diary-like series of reflections on childhood memories where she literally bears her soul, shining a light on what was the elephant in the room growing up.  Featuring a “haze of a languid summer” atmosphere, reminiscent of Lucrecia Martel’s LA CIÉNAGA (2001), heavily emphasizing silence, ambient sound, and the emotional weight of memory, we follow the parents struggling to understand, not knowing what to do, yet we also get glimpses of reality through the eyes and ears of Sasha, whose own innocence is mixed with instability and uncertainty, where beauty and trauma exist side by side, as she starts to notice cracks in her family’s dynamics as they struggle to help their troubled teenage son, Clip Blue Heron subtitulado YouTube (1:21).  While there’s an ominous undertone beneath the placid surface, what remains questionable is whether this film is too distanced, never really allowing viewers in, so the characters may feel too far away to become emotionally invested.  Given that amount of personal intimacy, however, one of the scenes that stands out is a poignant, magical-realist epilogue toward the end of the film, a “last day” scenario within the childhood home for Jeremy, scored to the hauntingly elegant Adagio movement of Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto, Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 73: II. Adagio un ... YouTube (9:23), offering a sense of grandeur to the uncomfortable, allowing for a poetic reckoning with a family’s painful history, which elevates the moment, remaining imprinted in our imaginations, revealing art can provide additional perspectives, but not answers.  Only late in the film do we learn that Jeremy is a unique artist, with precise, color-coded, architectural-detailed drawings that map city neighborhoods, literally exploring a subjective artistic world rarely, if ever, featured.

Thematically linked to Romvari’s short film Still Processing (2020), an extended artistic inquiry into her own family history, something she describes as “memory retrieval,” in this case concerning a brother with profound emotional and mental health problems, music is curated to reflect a haunting evocative score and personal nostalgia, as if sourced from her father’s home videos.  Despite the personal nature of the film, it never feels forced, and instead reflects the fragmented memories of lived experiences, where it feels as if information is intentionally concealed from us, leaving only small snippets of a larger picture, where it’s easy to get caught up in the simple pleasures of growing up in the pre-cellphone, pre-internet 90’s, balancing the concerned viewpoints of the parents against the freewheeling style of the children, where playing with the sprinkler in the yard holds a certain nostalgic fascination, but then a more distressing situation occurs when Jeremy is brought home in handcuffs by the police for shoplifting, Clip 2 Blue Heron subtitulado YouTube (1:45), opening our eyes to a distress signal, a cry for help, which largely goes unanswered, as therapy sessions are unsuccessful.  But then something radically strange occurs, as the entire movie gets re-contextualized, growing more experimental, knocking the audience off-balance, which is a daring move, with the film jumping ahead twenty years, where time literally collapses, without any hints or reveals other than the use of cellphones are prevalent.  Suddenly we see Sasha as an adult (Amy Zimmer), though nothing informs us of this shift, as she’s taken an interest in exploring this earlier segment of her life that she couldn’t understand at the time, becoming both an observer and participant within her own memories, thoughtfully searching for a bridge between our experiences growing up and our reflections looking back on it, exploring her father’s photographs and videos, always filming what she discovers.  Searching for a better understanding of her troubled brother, specifically interested in how treatment programs may have advanced in evaluating Jeremy’s condition, she films the opinions of actual psychologists and therapists, yet it remains ambiguous right to the end, revealing in an opening voiceover, “It’s true I spent most of my life being angry at him.  The older I get, the more I feel like I never even knew him at all.  My image of him now, I know, falls flat compared to reality.”  Clearly wrestling with something that cannot be fully understood, never providing any clear answers, yet always remaining empathetic, Romvari uses a pseudo-documentary style of filmmaking to pay an elegiac tribute to her brother’s life, veering into Terrence Malick 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life realms with the expansive music of Brian Eno, Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent) (Remastered 2019) YouTube (4:21), which plays as an adult Sasha is seen walking along the water with the Jeremy of her youth, literally becoming the filmmaker the director has become before our eyes, but never directly making that connection, instead it’s merely hinted at through poetic imagery.  In this sense, the film bears a remarkable resemblance to the visual language and evocative time shift at the end of Charlotte Wells’ 2023 Top Ten List #7 Aftersun, as both films weave memory and imagination into attempts to understand a family member that remains forever outside our grasp.  The director, on Letterboxd, listed a number of films of influence, Films that influenced Sophy Romvari's 'Blue Heron', many of which reflect a 1970’s naturalism, home movie aesthetics, and intimate family dramas, citing the performance-driven focus of John Cassavetes, the zoom lens usage of Robert Altman, and personal, nostalgic memory-focused work, with her parents’ own creative backgrounds and home videos deeply shaping her style.  Interestingly, after each night of production she’d read at least one chapter of Ray Carney’s 2001 book Cassavetes On Cassavetes.  There’s also an Éric Rohmer Le Rayon Vert (Summer) (1986) magical moment with a flashing light image seen near the end (purely unintentional, it seems) that adds a mysterious presence, like a call from beyond, or a land of twilight, as if part of the netherworld of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932).

Sophy Romvari's Closet Picks Criterion YouTube (3:43)

Party Girl

 

Director Daisy von Scherler Mayer

Mayer on the night of the premiere

Mayer with Parker Posey at the premiere

Mother and child, with Daisy as a child Cupid

PARTY GIRL            B                                                                                                           USA  (94 mi)  1995  d: Daisy von Scherler Mayer

They threw me a surprise birthday party without my permission.                                               —Mary (Parker Posey)

The first feature film to be shown in its entirety on a then-novel piece of technology called the Internet on June 3, 1995, likely seen by only a few hundred viewers, streamed in the Seattle (the tech mecca at the time) offices of a web hosting company Point of Presence (operating on an Internet speed of only 1.5 Mbps, arguably the lowest fidelity movie that has ever streamed over the Internet, as the average today is 42.86 Mbps), with actress Parker Posey even appearing live online to introduce the movie while simultaneously appearing at the Egyptian Theater opening as part of the Seattle Film Festival.  Never a box-office success, this is the film that made Posey a star in her first leading role, the ultimate 90’s indie girl, dubbed by Richard Corliss in a 1997 Time magazine article as the “Queen of the Indies,” referring to her ubiquitous presence playing eccentric characters in low-budget independent features like Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (1995), Mark Waters’ The House of Yes (1997), my own personal favorite along with Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool (1997), working again with him later in Fay Grim (2006) and Ned Rifle (2014), also Rebecca Miller’s PERSONAL VELOCITY (2002), Zoe Cassavetes’ BROKEN ENGLISH (2007), Michael Walker’s Price Check (2012), Woody Allen’s Irrational Man (2015) and Café Society (2016), and Kogonada’s 2017 Top Ten List #5 Columbus before recently joining The White Lotus television series as a Xanax pill-popping Southern Belle.  Starring in close to 30 independent films in the 1990’s alone, Parker accumulated quite an eclectic résumé, cementing herself as one of cinema’s greatest and most underrated comedic actresses, becoming the “It girl” of the era, a term associated with actress Clara Bow in the 1920’s. Known for her sharp wit, eccentric charm, and impeccable comedic timing, from her early days in independent cinema to her ventures into mainstream Hollywood, Parker Posey has consistently defied expectations, proving herself to be one of the most versatile and captivating actresses of her generation.  Unlike many Hollywood actresses who fit into traditional molds, Posey has always embraced the weird, the eccentric, and the unconventional.  Her characters are often flawed, chaotic, and hilariously self-absorbed, yet they remain deeply relatable.  One of her greatest strengths is her ability to deliver dialogue in a way that feels completely natural yet strangely heightened, as she always finds a way to make her characters feel authentic.  Moreover, Posey has never been afraid to take risks, having gravitated toward projects that allow her to showcase her unique comedic sensibility.  This commitment to authenticity has earned her a dedicated fan base that continues to grow, paving the way for a new kind of leading lady, one who didn’t need to conform to Hollywood’s rigid beauty standards or conventional storytelling tropes.  Other mischievous actresses like Greta Gerwig, Aubrey Plaza, and Jenny Slate owe a lot to Posey’s trailblazing work, as she helped redefine what it means to be a comedic actress, proving that being quirky, intellectual, and slightly unhinged can be just as captivating as being glamorous or traditionally romantic.  As far as the director goes, with a long career working mostly in television (her last actual movie was more than a decade ago), she grew up in New York during the 80’s, born into a Hollywood family, the daughter of famous luminaries, including her mother, theater actress Sasha von Scherler who appears in the film, and her father Paul Avila Mayer, an American soap opera television writer and producer, while her grandfather Edwin Justus Mayer was a famed Hollywood screwball comedy screenwriter, where she just happened to be a party girl in real life, drawing from many of her own personal experiences for a film that links its connection to youth culture.   

Budgeted at $150,000, brilliantly shot on location in pre-gentrification Lower Manhattan by a first-time director in just 19 days, Parker, who built a career largely playing supporting roles, never really finding crossover success as a mainstream star, earning just $75 dollars a day, plays a free-spirited, club-hopping 23-year old night owl named Mary, embodying the essence of 1990’s New York cool, where the film was ahead of its time, as style is the substance here, with an attention to detail blending comedy, fashion, and a deep love for books in a way that has made it an enduring cult classic.  Something of a fashionista with her distinctive personal style, often playful, vintage-inspired, and effortlessly cool, with a wardrobe stolen from the closets of women hosting parties, where her influence extends beyond film, Mary shares an apartment with her aspiring DJ roommate Leo (Guillermo Díaz), growing increasingly irritated with her former boyfriend and bouncer Nigel (Liev Schreiber with a British accent), making a living by organizing illegal rave parties in Manhattan’s underground club scene, but is arrested for charging customers at an unauthorized wild party and evicted from her Manhattan apartment for nonpayment of rent, causing her to be desperate enough to embark in a new direction.  Needing money badly, she finds work as a stamper, book stacker, and desk clerk in the quiet confines of a neighborhood branch of the public library under the auspices of her overworked godmother Judy Lindendorf (Sasha von Scherler, the director’s mother), the head librarian reeling from budget cuts, who still holds a grudge over just how irresponsible Mary’s late mother was, described as “a woman with no common sense,” while her late father was “a man without a conscience,” and continues to hold that against Mary, expressing doubts that she is sufficiently intelligent or reliable enough for the task, but she is family.  A little messy and discombobulated, specifically set within the LGBTQ community in Manhattan, offering authentic depictions of underrepresented communities, with many tasting freedom in the city for the very first time, often coming from towns where there was rampant prejudice, yet there is a repetitious use of quintessential club house music that dates the film, acting like a time capsule, selected by New York nightlife fixture Bill Coleman, reflective of the multi-cultural influence of the popular 90’s TV show In Living Color, along with a plethora of diverse secondary characters, where people of different ethnicities are seen dancing together, filling out a threadbare storyline.  Mary rebels against what is expected of her by displaying many of the qualities of the stereotypical librarian, who are typically women, where changing her physical appearance is a way of creating an important shift in personal identity, donning horn-rimmed glasses, sticking a pencil in her pulled-back hair, while adopting severe grey flannel suits over mini-skirts and designer stilettos, laying claim to a legitimacy by exuding both the look of a more mature woman and a glamor girl in what amounts to a love letter to public libraries, suggesting it’s cool to read and also have fun.  Making one blunder after another, she finds herself baffled by the Dewey Decimal System, calling it “antiquated and idiotic,” with a poster of Melvil Dewey hanging on the library wall continually frowning down on her, where she is reminded by Judy that “A trained monkey learned this system on PBS in a matter of hours,” growing so frustrated that one evening she sneaks into the library after hours with a beer and a joint and has an epiphany, seen euphorically dancing around the library to club music, suddenly unlocking the key to the entire order and system of organization.  Ironically, all that hard-earned library knowledge has now been replaced by a computer, making the Card Catalog system obsolete, faded out of time, yet oozing with nostalgic vibes.

Co-written by the director with Harry Birckmayer, shot on 16mm but blown up to 35mm, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995, the film led to a television series the following year with a new cast, but was quickly cancelled, never able to realize that same sardonic tone, and of course, there is no substitute for the driving engine that is Parker Posey, yet the re-issue of the film screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York and is part of a permanent exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.  Released the same year as Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995), Gregg Araki’s THE DOOM GENERATION (1995), and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), the film captures that liminal period between the AIDS epidemic and the sanitizing project of Rudy Giuliani’s mayorship, a time when dance clubs played vinyl records, cigarette butts piled up in ashtrays at the bar, and entry prices were still affordable, where a repeating visual cue has Mary visiting a local Lebanese street-cart food vendor, Mustafa (Omar Townsend in his only movie), who is also an aspiring teacher and romantic interest, always heard placing the exact same order, “Can I have a falafel with hot sauce, a side order of baba ganoush, and a seltzer, please.”  Theirs is a rocky romance, actually having sex in the library after hours, but she forgets to close the windows during a rainstorm when she locks up, causing all kinds of grief with Judy, as the water-soaked damage destroys some important volumes of poetry.  Despite all the shenanigans, the film is a mish-mosh of a burgeoning subculture of rave joints and the rise of the Internet, accentuating a heavily talked about queer 90’s New York club culture that has come and gone, as the film’s main creative forces were women and LGBTQ people, organically espousing an attitude of inclusivity while also being incredibly fun and positive throughout.  Because the cast of characters is so large and the nature of the story is episodic, it can often feel populated by sketches of characters, where all these interconnecting parts are actually much more interesting than the film itself, which is a bit chaotic and disjointed, yet confusion is part of its enduring mystery.  Epitomizing the early 90’s rave era, with a deep immersion into the library sciences, Posey exhibits style and a brash attitude, portraying an over-the-top character who isn’t perfect, by any means, prone to homophobic language and inappropriate Middle Eastern cultural references, yet it’s hard to take your eyes off her.  While not from New York City, a Baltimore transplant to a small town in the Deep South, many of Posey’s most iconic roles place her there, making the city her own existential playground, where her smart characters and uninhibited energy exude a self-aware, sarcastic cynicism, traits that came to be associated with abrasive and honest New Yorkers in popular culture while also serving as an implicit critical response to the conservative reshaping of the city in the eighties, taking inspiration from cinema’s other quintessential “New York girls,” such as Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly in Blake Edwards’ BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961) and Diane Keaton’s title character in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977).  While claiming Carole Lombard as an influence, Posey may come closest to the widespread appeal of 40’s and 50’s actress Judy Holliday, where her unbridled enthusiasm is mixed with an extreme vulnerability, where the refreshing ability to shift her mood quickly from frenetic screwball comedy to serious introspection provides a startling influx of emotion.  An institution in indie cinema, Posey’s unique energy and fearless approach to acting have made her one of the most beloved and influential performers of her time.

Daisy von Scherler Mayer's Top 10 | Current  Criterion