Art really is all one big continuum. However lazy the practice may be, it’s always tempting to review movies by breaking them down into lists of other works they recall. For instance, I spent the entirety of David Lowery’s haunted-dress popstar fable Mother Mary making a mental list of other recent (and, frankly, superior) titles it visually & thematically resembles: Vox Lux, In Fabric, Suspiria (2018), etc. I could write an entire review of that film just by listing titles, suggesting that most genre filmmaking is just simple recombinations of preexisting material, à la collage art. Often, though, a movie can really surprise you with its combinations of preexisting pop art, bringing together disparate influences that no one else would ever think to combine. Sophy Romvari’s debut feature Blue Heron is very likely the only movie I’ll see in my lifetime that prompts me to think about Pearl Jam & Jeanne Dielman at the same time, for whatever that combination is worth. On the Jeanne Dielman end, Romvari tracks the daily, lonely domestic labor performed by a young mother, at one point sitting down to peel a pile of potatoes in direct homage to Chantal Akerman’s slow-cinema classic. The Pearl Jam connection is much more direct, and yet, possibly unintentional. The reason that overworked, underslept mother (Iringó Réti) is so close to her wit’s end is because she’s struggling to raise an unruly, maladjusted teen (Edik Beddoes) who she’s convinced is capable of committing an act of violence that threatens the family home, with no systemic help to prevent it. The fact that the story is set in the 1990s and the violent teen shares the name “Jeremy” with the eponymous school-shooting subject of Pearl Jam’s melodramatic 90s hit likely means nothing to Romvari, but it’s a connection I can’t help but make as a viewer. Some homages are intentional; others are uncontrollable happenstance.
As long as I’m playing the movie-connections game, Blue Heron‘s two most obvious points of comparison are other recent critical favorites in which first-time directors confront uneasy childhood truths from their own Millennial past: Annie Baker’s Janet Planet and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun. When Romvari restages the potato-peeling scene from Jeanne Dielman, she adds a second character to the frame in a fictionalized version of her childhood self (Eylul Guven). In that way, the observation of her mother’s labor becomes the film’s subject instead of the labor itself. The same goes for that child’s observation of Jeremy’s teen-in-crisis behavior, later diagnosed by social workers as “Oppositional Defiance Disorder.” Romvari never fully divulges to the audience what childhood tragedy Jeremy is responsible for, even though this is her second film on the subject, after her self-documentary short “Still Processing.” All she can muster the strength to do is observe it from a distance, mediated through the camera gadgetry her emotionally-checked-out father (Ádám Tompa) documented his family with in the 1990s and again through her own autofictional documentation in the 2020s. She observes Jeremy twice here, both as his younger sister who only understands that he’s putting unbearable stress on her parents and as an adult who’s presumably been through years of post-trauma therapy, and yet still struggles to understand why he acted the way he did. For a slightly clearer idea of what real-world harm the fictionalized “Jeremy” caused in Romvari’s family, it helps to have seen “Still Processing” before watching Blue Heron, but both films are left as intentionally incomplete as the short’s title suggests. Like Wells & Baker, Romvari can only convey these mysterious adult-world crises through her own childlike observations as she remembers them, now even further distorted by the passage of time and the limitations of narrative filmmaking.
It’s not entirely fair to discuss Blue Heron through comparisons to preexisting works, at least not in its second half. After the familiar reexamination of her childhood confusion & trauma in the first half, Romvari then takes a much more direct approach with the project. She casts a second actor to play her current-day adult self (Amy Zimmer), who’s making her own movie about what went wrong with Jeremy and what, if anything, could’ve been done to prevent it. In the movie’s most excitingly original idea, Romvari literalizes her project by treating the past as a geographic place that can be traveled to and physically accessed, at least within cinema’s internal logic. Her adult avatar returns to her childhood home to directly interact with her family as they were in the 1990s (including her younger self), using the autofictional drama as a mundane form of time travel. All of the first half’s nostalgic immersion Windows ’95 user interface, Ron Popeil infomercials, and oversized cargo pants are ultimately just a method to distinguish the film’s two timelines, which impossibly crossover in the second half. While content to leave the audience unsure of exactly what tragedy Jeremy triggers in his family and how autobiographical that tragedy is to her real family’s story, Romvari appears to be clear-eyed in what she’s accomplishing here. She is confronting some half-remembered, semi-fictionalized version of her past through cinematic devices, so why not send her onscreen avatar directly to ground zero to assess the damage first-hand? I can’t say that I found that device to be as formally radical or as emotionally devastating as the film’s festival-circuit hype suggests, but I do at least appreciate its clarity in method & intent. I should’ve known going in that this wouldn’t hit especially hard with me, based on the similar public hype & personal response disparity of Janet Planet & Aftersun—two widely beloved films I also liked just fine—but I really do try to go into movies with no preconceived notions or comparisons clouding my view. I try, and I fail, because all of these things really are in conversation with each other, intentionally or not.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 