Sophy Romvari’s semi autobiographical drama “Blue Heron” is many things, but what stood out to me the most is the idea that, sometimes, life doesn’t always have the answers or solutions we desperately look for. For the longest time, I found myself revisiting certain personal experiences, trying to understand them, trying to find explanations for the behaviors I encountered. But maybe that is the point the film makes. Sometimes, the right answer simply doesn’t exist, and learning to live with that and process it is just a part of being human. The story of “Blue Heron” is narrated through the perspective of young Sasha, and it is essentially built from fragments of her childhood memories. As an adult, she begins piecing those moments together, trying to understand the past and find some form of closure. Set in the 90s, Romvari builds a beautiful world that made me extremely nostalgic, whether it’s the father’s retro computer or the simple experience of going to a museum with the mother and siblings. The core of the story might be rooted in sadness, but the way the little girl observes the world around her is something that resonated with me.
Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the film?
A Hungarian couple moves to Vancouver, hoping to find some peace and stability, as their oldest son, Jeremy, struggles with severe behavioral challenges that have deeply affected the family. Jeremy was born to a different father, and his siblings, Sasha, Felix, and Henry, do not experience the same difficulties he does. Little Sasha is pure and innocent, and she doesn’t understand why her elder brother behaves that way. When Mother takes the kids to a museum, Sasha notices Jeremy stealing a blue heron keychain from the shelves. That’s just the beginning, as Sasha’s life is very different from other kids her age with Jeremy around. Sasha returns home one day and sees that Jeremy is lying down on the front porch, and her parents are getting calls from the concerned neighbours. Both Father and Mother try their best to not agitate Jeremy, and the psychologist’s advice to them is to not address Jeremy whenever he behaves like this and let him get bored on his own. But that strategy doesn’t work for long, as Jeremy is brought home by the cops one day, as he’s stolen something once again, and this time he has to be presented in a court room. Mother and Father’s lives keep getting harder and harder, so much so that when Sasha wants to invite a friend over for dinner, Mother has to turn down the innocent demand from her young daughter.
Why does Mother send Jeremy away?
Jeremy’s behaviour worsens as the days go by, but there’s nothing Mother and Father can do except control the damage. In a scene, we see Jeremy threatening to step on the sand castle Sasha was building, but he stops and leaves the blue heron keychain he stole earlier on top of the castle. All the neighbours start talking about Jeremy, and Mother feels guilty that she can neither help Jeremy, nor give the rest of her kids the normal life that they deserve. One day, while the Mother is cooking while Sasha looks on, they hear thumping footsteps on the roof. Mother runs out of the house to see that Jeremy is walking all over the roof, and he could fall at any moment. She screams in fear for Father, and both of them pretty much beg him to come down, but it really doesn’t look like that their pleading is getting through to him at all. Another night, after a tough day, Mother and Father hear the sound of glass breaking, and it turns out that Jeremy has punched one of the windows, and his hand is bleeding profusely. Seeing that there is no other option, they call the social services for help. We see a social worker visiting the house, and after a while, Mother is on the call with someone, telling them that she has agreed to relocate Jeremy, while her kids play outside and her husband records them.
Why Is Sasha Making A Documentary About Her Brother?
When her parents are talking to the social worker, young Sasha stops watching “Mean Girls” with her brothers and tries to eavesdrop by the door. The film then shifts to twenty years later, and Sasha is a filmmaker now. We hear her on a phone call with her mother, and the poor woman still blames herself, she thinks maybe Jeremy would have grown up to be a superstar if he was raised by someone else. On the other hand, Sasha invites a bunch of social workers to interview them, she provides them with Jeremy’s information and asks them if he could’ve been helped better than he was. Most of them can’t really figure out what could’ve been done differently, but what stands out is that one of them says that even twenty years later, there isn’t adequate help or treatment available for such a case, so one can only imagine how worse it was for Jeremy when he was growing up. Relocation also is an uncertain solution, as sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, and there is really no way to predict if it’s the right option. Sasha also visits her own house, but she pictures herself as the social worker from all those years ago, except she has all the information about how Jeremy’s life turned out after that day. Father shows her Jeremy’s room, which has a very elaborate map of the city, and his Walkman that he was always using. Then comes the most pivotal scene of the film; the social worker interviewing her parents about Jeremy, but Sasha is still picturing herself as the social worker. We get to know that when Jeremy was six, he was playing catch with Father, and suddenly his eyes went cross, so he couldn’t catch the ball anymore. Mother tells us that he had to get really huge glasses at such a young age, and combined with his accent, he became the kid that the bullies loved to pick on in school. Mother thinks that she’s cursed, and despite her constant efforts, Jeremy couldn’t be helped. He started stealing for fun, even when it resulted in him getting battered by other kids; he’d still think it’s fun. Jeremy also tried to sell fake drugs when he was 14, as well as keeping gasoline in his room, threatening to burn the house down with his family inside. The film goes completely meta, and when Mother freaks out about the social worker’s suggestion to put Jeremy in foster care, she asks if she could still visit Jeremy. Sasha tells her parents that relocation won’t help Jeremy, and they’ll see him again. They’ll try to keep him in their house again, which will consume them, isolate them from the outside world, and it will only keep worsening. She also tells them that they’ll eventually lose Jeremy, indicating that Jeremy has already passed away off screen. Sasha takes a good look at her childhood memories, lying on the bed with her brothers, watching TV, also remembering how she couldn’t help herself and barged into the room when the social worker was talking to her parents.
Does Sasha ever find closure with what happened to her brother?
Sasha has kept the blue heron keychain her brother gave her all those years ago, and in the final sequence of the film, we see her picturing herself with Jeremy, and they’re on the beach. She asks Jeremy if he had a friend named Elijah, and when Jeremy says he did, she cannot remember it. Jeremy says that there’s a lot she doesn’t remember, signifying that the entire film is told from Sasha’s perspective, and just like any of us, her accounts from her childhood might not have the full picture of everything that happened. However, she reads a letter from Elijah, who has reached out to Sasha after watching her documentary about Jeremy. Elijah says that he bonded with Jeremy in school, and Jeremy showed him his maps, which remains some of the most unique art he’s ever come across. Elijah saw Jeremy drifting apart from everyone with time but he was unsure about how he could help him. After high school, Elijah thought about his old friend quite often, but he couldn’t track him down on Facebook or any other medium. When he saw Sasha’s film, he learned that Jeremy had died, and he tells Sasha that he gets how she might have some anger and regret about her brother, but he knew her brother as a kind-hearted person who left a mark on him. From this letter, you can somewhat figure out that Jeremy wasn’t just the person that he was presented as, he was more than that. From his friendship with Elijah to him giving a blue heron keychain to his younger sister, there was some tenderness in his heart that even people close to him overlooked, including Sasha. Our memories never truly do justice to a person we knew or even grew up with, and there might be no right way to ever completely know someone. Jeremy’s life was tragic, but so were the lives of his parents and siblings, who tried their best to help him but couldn’t. It is cruel that sometimes we are forced to accept a tragedy without having the power to change it. Perhaps the only way to deal with that kind of grief is to understand it as best we can, to gather every piece of information possible, hoping that someday we can finally process it. The film closes with Sarah overlooking the horizon of her childhood hometown, taking a picture of it, the same town which Jeremy also knew by heart, and the boy even created a map out of it.
Daniel Johnson’s “Some Things Last a Long Time” plays as the credits roll, and one of the lines says, “I think about you, often, often.” The song perfectly sums up Sasha’s situation, because even after everything that happened, Jeremy continues to exist in her memories. Like the song suggests, some people never truly leave us; they remain in the questions we ask, the moments we revisit, and the memories we hold onto, even when we know we may never fully understand them.
