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)

The Lost Daughter

 

Gyllenhall (center) surrounded by Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson

Director Maggie Gyllenhaal on the set

Maggie Gyllenhaal (left) with actress Olivia Colman

Gyllenhaal on the set

Gyllenhaal (left) with Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson

Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE LOST DAUGHTER           B                                                                                                USA  (121 mi)  2021  d:  Maggie Gyllenhaal

An internalized psychological trauma film that borders on horror, with Gyllenhaal, in her first directed feature, adapting an introspective 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante, a pseudonym for an anonymous author, that becomes a memory play of a Mediterranean summer vacation, as a literary professor on vacation in the Greek isles develops an unhealthy obsession with a young American mother, recalling her own difficult experiences, becoming a challenging comment on the difficulties of motherhood, which can be an incredibly hard and thankless task, particularly when it interferes with professional career choices, usually with little support from the fathers who tend to bail in these situations.  For Gyllenhaal (her mother is Oscar-nominated screenwriter Naomi Foner while her father, Stephen Gyllenhaal, had a long directing career, mostly in television), this is not your typical motherhood story and an impressive filmmaking debut, winning the Best Screenplay award at Venice by adapting a first-person novel without the use of voiceovers, instead creating an internalized experience directly through the style of filmmaking, much like Eliza Hittman does with 2020 Top Ten List #5 Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a film that shares the same cinematographer.  Essentially the story of a woman overwhelmed by motherhood, with traumatized memories of disastrous moments when prolonged absences took a toll on her two young daughters, one of whom was particularly affected, demanding more of her than she could give, finding it difficult to make the transition from literary scholar to mother, particularly when they feel emotionally neglected, acting out their anxieties in public, making scenes that embarrass the mother, feeling less than adequate in the role of a stressed out parent, often reduced to tears of exasperation.  While many could easily overlook this film as an atypical motherhood, casting criticism and blame, yet what’s really remarkable is despite the strangeness and uncomfortable nature of the subject matter, it’s an all too common, somewhat secret experience that many women have.  If it was a man, leaving their family for successful career choices would be no big deal, as society would think nothing of letting them off the hook, but when it’s a woman, they are held to a different, and higher standard, as there’s a huge amount of guilt placed on their shoulders simply because they are a woman, subject to moral condemnation, blamed for being selfish and inconsiderate, while inevitably being labeled a bad mother.  This film explores the uncomfortable nature of that aspect of motherhood, causing serious internal doubt over their abilities to balance two things at once, as academic scholarship requires plenty of invested time, but so do young developing families.  The entire film is told as a flashback, as Leda (Olivia Colman) a 48-year old divorced comparative literature professor with a specialty in Italian translations, goes on a working holiday to spend the summer alone with her books on a Greek island, continually lost in thought, becoming something of a voyeur, running into another woman there, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who is part of a much larger Greek-American contingency from Queens who happen to be loud and rowdy, literally taking over the beach, as if it were their own personal property, often interrupting her experiences with ugly behavior that is borderline abusive, yet what happens to catch her eye is how Nina is struggling with a difficult child that is always crying or clinging to her, apparently suffering from parental fatigue, with a husband Toni (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who appears to be bad news, part of the overly aggressive male group that tends to be drunk and out of control, offering little help with the rambunctious child.  Things take a turn for the worse when the child disappears, leading to a frantic search, discovered by Leda in a nearby woods playing by herself, returning her to her appreciative mother, opening the way for more conversations, discovering they share many qualities, but this event triggers flashbacks of her own difficult experiences as an overwhelmed young mother, taking a beach trip of her own when one of her girls went missing, generating a very curiously developing relationship with Nina, who in many ways reminds her of herself.  The older/younger woman dynamic was previously explored in Ozon’s SWIMMING POOL (2003), a clash of contrasts, where an ambiguous relationship between two women turns into a tense, psychological thriller.  Here, the little girl discovers her doll is missing, throwing uncontrollable tantrums that extend into several days, becoming utterly inconsolable, causing her mother unending misery and distress.  Inexplicably, and perhaps without even realizing it, Leda has stolen the doll after watching the child angrily bite her doll in reaction to her parents having an argument, bringing a disturbingly perverse element to the film, reliving her own tormented experiences through that doll, yet somehow it all remains a bit baffling, as if punishing that little girl for mistreating her doll.    

Shot in Spetses, Greece on the fictional Greek island of Kyopeli by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, who also shot the barely seen Karim Aïnouz Brazilian film 2019 Top Ten List #4 Invisible Life (A Vida Invisível), making extensive use of close-ups, expressing a great deal of intimacy, featuring an exquisite musical track by Dickon Hinchliffe, with a lead blues piano and organ score that pulsates underneath what transpires with the introductory character of Leda, Let Me Tell You All About It | The Lost Daughter (Soundtrack ... YouTube (5:00), renting a beach house while working on translations.  Her character flashes back to her younger days where Leda is a PhD student played by Jessie Buckley, so good in Charlie Kaufman’s I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020), who’s got her hands full with two young girls, Bianca and Martha, struggling to do her work with an ineffective husband, Joe (Jack Farthing), also an academic, both faced with similar demands of raising children who cry out for their attention, yet he invokes the male privilege, inherently thinking his work deserves precedence over hers, refusing to do his fair shair of parenting, believing her role is to look after the children.  Under those conditions, with neither parent willing to adjust to their children’s needs, she’s unable to balance work with her children’s incessant interruptions, with suggestions that motherhood can be brutal, often losing her temper, yet she’s very proficient in her academic field.  Leda is translating British-American poet W.H. Auden into Italian, impressing other scholars, one of whom is Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard, the director’s husband), who she meets at an academic symposium effusively praising her work, leading to a seduction sequence where he quotes the W.B. Yeats poem Leda and the Swan to her in its entirety and in Italian, as she was named after the mythological character who was seduced/raped by Zeus in the form of a swan, where even in Greek mythology men act with impunity, while women suffer the psychological consequences.  Part of the film’s intent is to recreate the uncomfortable aspects of motherhood, elevated to the extreme, with the rape metaphor suggesting dominating images with traumatic aftereffects (Leda’s offspring led to the Trojan War), as Leda fled the harshness of her family life, leaving her children for a period of three years to pursue her studies and her career, recalling her own childhood as a “black shithole,” so the appearance of the family on the beach is not just a view of aggression and a harsh reminder of maternity, but a specific recollection of the terrors of her own childhood.  The film is basically a distillation of subjective memory, combining the past with the present, while creating a menacing aspect of Greek masculinity, with the men in Nina’s family providing a terrorizing presence, always viewed in a threatening manner, like a Greek chorus of male patriarchy standing in the way of any advancement of women, as evidenced by her attempts to watch a movie in a local theater, but it is constantly interrupted by vulgar remarks and comments that feel more like drunken outbursts from teenage bullies, but much of it is personal, specifically singling her out, at least this is her perception, with the director building sustained tension from her vulnerable predicament of being alone.  This experience is repeated at a local dance, when she appears to let herself go, personally identifying with the Bon Jovi song, Livin’ on a Prayer, The Lost Daughter | Bon Jovi reference YouTube (2:28), perhaps reminding her of better times, but then these men make their appearance, running her away from the event altogether, basically ostracizing her from the community, reviving deep feelings of personal shame, in effect, leaving her feeling overwhelmingly disconnected from herself, excoriated in her own mind, turning her own bitterness against her, teeming with self-hatred, still unwilling to forgive herself, even after all these years,.  While she is undergoing these experiences, she is also developing a mysteriously secret relationship with the doll, which actually borders on horror, as Nina has put up reward signs for the missing doll, with her daughter sick and overly distraught from its disappearance, constantly misbehaving, refusing to play with her mother, avoiding her altogether, as if shunning her, with the viewer continually perplexed by the extreme degree of cruelty that she is inflicting on an innocent child, making it difficult to empathize with her situation, yet she is the centerpiece and focal point of the film.  Curiously, and perhaps thankfully, nothing is ever explained here, things just happen, yet easily one of the most chilling things we hear Leda say is “I’m an unnatural mother.”  Batten down the hatches, as that will raise a few eyebrows.    

Reminiscent of the gloomy interiority inhabited by Jane Campion’s THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996), a rendering of the cavernous realms of a woman’s unhappiness, largely shaped by societal entrapment, while here Leda drifts through often painful reminiscences of times when she put her own needs above her family life, choices she now feels she’s paying the price for in her solitude.  This is a film that would play out differently if seen in a theater, as stylistically it is designed for that uninterrupted experience where the audio and visual interplay is allowed to immerse itself into the subconscious minds of viewers.  Exquisitely moving back and forth in time, the overall strategy remains vague and ambiguous, like a puzzle piece, as this notion of a missing child has a hold on the adult Leda, who is fiercely attached to the stolen doll, as one of her younger daughters once was, developing what can only be described as a fetish attachment, becoming a metaphor for her missing needs and wants, which remain strangely out of reach on this distant island.  She goes through an awkward flirtation stage with the older house caretaker, Lyle (Ed Harris), who befriends her and attempts to develop a romantic aspect of their friendship, with Leda unsure if she wants to play along, yet occasionally gives him signs that she is, having dinner with him one evening, leaving the doll in open sight at one point, where it’s clear he sees it, but says nothing about it to anyone, suggesting he is a man she could trust.  She happily dances with him in an open-air dance, that is until Toni and his male brood appears, making a quick exit out of there afterwards.  She also develops a curious friendship with Nina, who continually asks about her own children, attempting to break through the façade of a foreigner on the beach, with Leda hesitant initially, then becoming fully engaged with her, sharing extremely personal recollections of her own difficulties with her children, often growing irritated and depressed, suggesting it doesn’t get any better.  Describing herself as a selfish person, she acknowledges the only way things got any better for her was that she left her children altogether, totally exhilarated by the freedom, but returned for them years later because she simply missed them too much.  This relationship gets intimate at one point when she buys a hatpin for Nina and delicately pokes it through her hair to keep her sunhat in place, a gesture of good will and friendship, yet this relationship also brings with it the full assault of memories of her own dreadful past, which is accentuated by the aggressive behavior of the surrounding men in Nina’s life who continually haunt Leda with a kind of taunting demeanor, only to find herself in solitude, with a significant weight on her shoulders.  She happens to be reading Dante’s Paradiso, the final section of his Divine Comedy, scribbling notes in the margins, where the idyllic nature of this remote paradise on earth seems to continually elude her, yet much of it is her own doing, her own directness, offering a bracingly candid view of the difficulties of motherhood as a “crushing responsibility.”  Nina seems to be following in her footsteps, having a sexual affair with Will (Paul Mescal), a young student who works as a cabana boy at the beach, with Will awkwardly asking if they could use her beach house, needing somewhere to get away.  Leda feels pressured, believing she has little choice, so when Nina arrives at her door for the keys, she invites her in and casually returns the doll, claiming she was just playing around, which only enrages Nina, going berserk with anger, stabbing her in the stomach with the hatpin and defiantly leaves, sickened and disgusted by her behavior.  While the ending remains ambiguous, what’s perhaps most interesting is just how unlikable the characters are, yet they are walking contradictions, not easy to pin down, filled with moments of tenderness and grace, yet also an impulsive selfishness, leading to a kind of open callousness and disregard for others, a duality embraced by the actors with superb performances, yet the film also delves deeply into the interiority of women, considered in intimate detail, adding murkier complexities that are missing altogether from other female exposé movies, where the darker toll of motherhood is rarely explored.  This boundary breaking film challenges viewers in unexpected ways, as women aren’t always what we expect them to be, offering unspoken truths about the painstaking difficulties of motherhood, widening our appreciation and understanding of how women can be vulnerable and exposed, yet also selfishly determined, with this film artfully exploring the deeply-felt and wide-ranging aspects of the female experience.