{Cinema review} – Blue Heron by Sophy Romvari – Baz’art: Films, books…

 

With Blue Heron, Canadian-Hungarian director Sophy Romvari creates a film that cannot be told. It is felt.

It all starts simply. A move. A family, four children, a new house. And very quickly, something cracks. The eldest son, Jeremy, isolates himself. His behavior becomes unpredictable, sometimes dangerous. The parents try to understand. To act. To possess.

But nothing is enough.

And this is where the film becomes moving.

Because Blue Heron cannot be viewed from a distance.

He takes us on board.

We live with them.

We cross with them.

Fatigue.

Fear.

I blamed her.

We understand them.

We accompany them.

And sometimes we want to shake them, jostle them, tell them what to do.

Then, the next moment, we just want to hold them.

The film places us in a rare position: that of deeply involved spectators.

Then what few films manage to capture so accurately sets in: the exhaustion of loving when you no longer understand.

If they move. Again. It’s to escape the gaze of others. But reality catches up with them. Until this impossible decision: accept the placement of their child.

And the film rocks.

Because Blue Heron then becomes a quest somewhat in the vein of Charlotte Wells (Aftersun),

That of a sister, now an adult, who returns to this story to reconstruct its fragments.

His research moves deeply.

Because she tries to understand without ever judging.

Because it seeks to reconstruct what, at the time, had no meaning.

The film adopts a singular form. Between fiction and documentary. Between memories and silences. He doesn’t try to explain. It shows.

To capture these emotions vividly, the staging chooses slowness.

The shots stretch out, letting the silences, the looks, the tensions breathe.

An approach which is reminiscent of Call Me by Your Name by Luca Guadagnino, where the slowness already made it possible to capture, as closely as possible, the inner upheavals.

And that’s precisely where Blue Heron hits.

In these unsaid things.

In this impossibility of naming what hurts.

Every point of view counts.

But they all reach us.

Nature, omnipresent, amplifies this solitude.

As if the world continued without them.

And then there are the actors. All remarkably accurate.

A mother who carries everything.  Amy Zimmer,

Un père qui s’efface. ádám Tompa

And this son, Eylul Guven, elusive, confusing, but deeply human.

Blue Heron is a film of rare truth.

A film that doesn’t just tell stories.

It makes you feel.

He doesn’t give an answer.

But it squeezes the heart.

And long later, he stays.

 

I look like Maxime Dorian

 

Blue Heron

At the cinema on June 24

Réalisation et scénario : Sophy Romvari