This review may contain spoilers.
I discovered Sophy’s work with Still Processing in 2021. I’ve written about my experience with that film at length and how sitting in a dark closet at 2 am at work in the middle of COVID felt like a respite. Working backwards through the rest of her shorts, I found a filmmaker whose sensibilities matched my own in ways I’d both been craving and had no idea I needed.
Her experiments with truth and fiction, screens and still life, cinema as memory as time…it was all so rejuvenating at a time when I thought cinema couldn’t be more stale. Maybe COVID helped with that, but these were feelings I’d been having for years, and they largely haven’t gotten better. To be so open yet obfuscating on camera, with a history both her own but sometimes playful and hidden, made her one of the most exciting filmmakers of our generation. A voice so tapped into the fallacy of nostalgia when every other filmmaker sought to tap into it. A poison dart through the heart of inspiration as a style guide where no vision of self remains. She’s one of one, to me.
Perhaps it’s impossible for me to be objective about Blue Heron with that history loaded into the expectation of her first feature, but what has her work been about if not the bullshit facade of objectivity? We can’t help but be our lived experiences and that her work, specifically Blue Heron, front-loads that is a gift. I don’t believe in mysticism or spirituality, and the closest I get is through cinema. Time traveling through Blue Heron brought me right back to that closet in 2021. Surrounded by darkness and falling into photos of a family that wasn’t at all my own, the familiarity within the echoes of sound blurred those lines. To have that experience in a theater, now? Nothing like it.
Spoilers?
What’s so fascinating about Blue Heron is that who knows where the truth actually lies? Her playfulness, intentionally obscuring memory, is electric here. Truth bouncing between reflections of mirrors and windows, memory ambling along from a child’s eye view. For as much as Sophy puts of herself onscreen, she hides her own catharsis in a silent whisper that we’ll never hear. That’s the magic. Forever searching.
The entire cast is kind of tremendous, but I have to call out Amy Zimmer, someone who I’ve found extremely funny in the past, and who gives an entirely different performance here. Full of a lifetime of pain, just bubbling beneath the surface. The few times she actually lets it crack are something special. Having to play someone honoring their own grief in a way that’s performing service for someone else seems really fucking hard. Don’t know how she compartmentalized that, but it’s maybe the most perfect match to Sophy’s concerns as a filmmaker that one could hope for.
Needless to say, I adored this.
