Family matters

Delicate and devastating, this small Canadian drama starts with a voiceover narrative. A filmmaker (Amy Zimmer) speaks about the unreliability of childhood memory — how certain moments stand out with bright clarity while the larger context can be hazy.

She remembers her troubled older brother through images, through feelings, but as she has become older, she wonders what she might have misunderstood or missed.

Blue Heron, Toronto-based writer- director Sophy Romvari’s semi-autobiographical feature debut, becomes a layered investigation into family narratives and the elusive line between art and life. Excavating an often painful past, Romvari’s work is ambitious and quietly assured, but it maintains a frank humility in the face of difficult, perhaps unanswerable questions.

The film (in English, with some subtitled Hungarian) begins as an extended flashback to the 1990s as a Hungarian-Canadian family of six moves to Vancouver Island hoping for a fresh start.

Romvari doesn’t give us much explication. She just drops us into an immersive experience of what seems, at first, like an idyllic summer in a leafy green suburb.

There are kids playing in sprinklers, messing around at the beach and riding bikes along lanes. There is the hypnotized TV-watching of young children. Like the recent Icelandic film The Love That Remains, Blue Heron is incredibly good at catching the intimate rhythms and textures of everyday family life.

But even as eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) spends a lot of time doing regular kid stuff, we catch glimpses of her unhappy, isolated teenage brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes).

Wondering about Jeremy’s moods, waiting for the next explosion, noticing every little thing, Sasha becomes watchful, vigilant. Through her shooting style, Romvari suggests Sasha’s childhood has formed the adult filmmaker.

Fraught family dynamics are conveyed through overheard conversations and sounds in other rooms, through gestures and expressions seen from a distance as the camera moves cautiously around the family’s home and yard.

We follow the increasingly desperate parents (Iringo Reti and Adam Tompa) as they struggle to get help for their son, trying to sort out conflicting expert opinions about whether Jeremy is just “acting out” or whether he has a serious psychiatric disorder.

We see, again in brief glimpses, the strains in their marriage — though they can at least bond over their shared dislike of a particularly condescending child psychiatrist.

Looking at how Jeremy’s issues affect the whole family, Romvari relies on the understated work of her ensemble cast, getting unforced, naturalistic work from the child actors and particularly from Beddoes, who handles a challenging, almost wordless role with subtlety and restraint.

The film shifts suddenly at its midpoint to two decades ahead, becoming an even more experimental mix of truth and fiction. (This complexity has been foreshadowed by a scene of the kids watching that fantastic Canadian television PSA about “the North American House Hippo.” If you know, you know. If you don’t, you should Google it right now.)

The adult Sasha is now a documentarian attempting to reconstruct aspects of her childhood, trying to figure out how the system failed her brother and her family. She meets with social workers and medical people (played by real-life professionals).

The film becomes more and more meta, but this isn’t some clever, showoffy exercise. Rather, Blue Heron is constructed to evoke a poetic, poignant sense of the layered interactions of reality and representation, past and present, love and loss.

Ultimately, there are no pat answers here, just a clear-eyed vision of how we use art to give meaningful form to our grief, guilt and uncertainty. This is a hushed film that makes an important statement, marking Romvari as a filmmaker to watch.

winnipegfreepress.com/alisongillmor