A Hungarian immigrant family grapple with oppositional defiant disorder in Sophy Romvari’s intimate and unshowy debut feature
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’s 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’t orchestrate its agony in the Hollywood style but almost confides it to the viewer, intimately and sotto voce.
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 cinéma, yet Romvari’s sophistication doesn’t 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.
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