The Souvenir Part II
Joanna Hogg (2021)
Like part one, part two is the film of its year, according to Sight & Sound’s annual poll of critics. As with its predecessor, that accolade overstates the merits of The Souvenir Part II and reflects the perceived worthiness of its subject matter – the personal and creative development of a woman film-maker – as much as its actual quality. Even so, Joanna Hogg’s film is engrossing and, more surprisingly, enjoyable. The Souvenir was recently shown on television; catching the tail end of it on BBC iPlayer a few days before seeing Part II supplied helpful memory-jogging context for the sequel. Although I can’t see Hogg’s diptych as a masterpiece, these semi-autobiographical films do amount to a substantial achievement.
In the climax to part one, the protagonist Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) learned that her drug-addict boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke) had been found dead – in the toilets of the Wallace Collection, the museum where the couple saw the Fragonard painting from which the film takes its name. Part II picks up from this point. Julie’s mother and father – Rosalind (Tilda Swinton) and William (James Spencer Ashworth) – are gently sympathetic but unable to help their daughter much in her bereavement. At the film school where she’s studying, people keep telling Julie they’re sorry for her loss. She visits Anthony’s shocked parents (Barbara Peirson and James Dodds), who aren’t seen again thereafter, and a psychotherapist (Gail Ferguson), who is. The slow progress forward from the immediate aftermath of Anthony’s death, although it takes some getting used to, convincingly expresses Julie’s struggle to ‘move on’. Shots illustrating the changing seasons – trees and flowers in bud and bloom, etc – punctuate the narrative throughout but Hogg, with one notable exception late on, doesn’t use dates on the screen or news stories on a TV screen-within-the-screen to indicate how much time is passing. The film’s momentum starts to build – and Julie emerges from mourning to gain force and agency as a character – as she devises what will be her film school graduation piece.
In the first film, Anthony’s influence on Julie qua creative was imperceptible. Part II more than compensates for that: her graduation film seems to be, essentially, an account of their relationship. The film school authorities (Crispin Buxton, Richard Bevan, Steve Gough, Jonathan Hourigan) take a dim view of her sketchy scenario; her on-the-fly approach on set exasperates the assistant director (Nick Woolgar). Julie continues to get financial help from her mother and enjoys the moral and practical support of fellow students Garance (Ariane Lebed) and, especially, Marland (Jaygann Ayeh), but she increasingly stands up for what she wants, and for herself. She doesn’t develop a new romantic relationship, and this aspect of the story is particularly well handled. Although the film that Julie is making is about her and Anthony, Hogg doesn’t thereby suggest that he remains the only man in her life. Quite early on, Julie is virtually forced to have sex with a fellow student (Charlie Heaton), who, from the moment he sees her, appears to have only one thing on his mind. Her not having sex with two other men has more, and more interesting, impact.
First, there’s Pete (Harris Dickinson), a theatre actor engaged to play Anthony’s alter ego in Julie’s film. Pete is anxious to get a better understanding of his role and his character’s motivation – anxious, too, since he knows about the real Anthony, not to intrude on private grief. Harris Dickinson asks Pete’s questions with such penetrating but sensitive urgency that you wonder if Julie will be charmed – if Pete will become the new Anthony off set, too – but nothing more happens. Even better is a slightly longer episode involving film editor Max (Joe Alwyn). After working together on Julie’s footage, Max invites her out for a drink, and she agrees. In the pub, it’s clear they like each other, and it’s she who asks if he wants to come back to her Knightsbridge flat. Max politely declines, explaining that he has promised to cook supper for his boyfriend, who’s not in good health. Julie absorbs this affably; there appear to be no hard feelings. Beautifully played, the scene is a good example of Hogg’s subtle ways of pointing up the 1980s setting of the story. Without concealing his sexuality, Max doesn’t acknowledge it until he needs to do so. His partner’s illness may (or may not) be a reference to AIDS. When, very occasionally, the period detail doesn’t convince, it’s probably a consequence of Hogg’s encouraging her cast to improvise. In a spat between Julie and the assistant director, his every second word is ‘like’ – not such a popular mannerism forty years ago as it is now.
The difference that Julie’s/Joanna’s gender has made to critical reception of the two films is no surprise but striking nevertheless. It’s inconceivable that a male protagonist from the same posh, wealthy background as Julie – aspiring artist or otherwise – would be considered so intrinsically sympathetic. In Part II, as in the first film, Marland is a very simple character, little more than nice and supportive to Julie. I don’t know if he’s based on one of Hogg’s friends from film school and, if so, whether that friend was Black or if putting Jaygann Ayeh in the role is meant to be colour-blind casting. Since Marland is one of only two significant non-white people in Julie’s story, it’s hard not to notice his ethnicity. If he were the loyal sidekick, and nothing more, to a white hero rather than a white heroine, the writer-director would, with good reason, be hauled over the coals. I’m not finding fault with Joanna Hogg here – just observing how some critics apply a double standard in these things.
The other Black character in Part II is a different matter: Richard Ayoade returns as modish, tantrum-prone film-maker Patrick, who knew Anthony well before Julie did. Her continuing need to find out more about her dead lover might have served as a pretext for why Patrick has as much screen time as he does. Instead, he’s mostly seen, and heard, excoriating his crew (Erik Wilson, Alex Robertson, Emyr Glyn Rees, Les Child) – Julie, too, when she insists she likes his work but can’t articulate why – to Patrick’s satisfaction, anyway. As in the first film, Richard Ayoade proves an accomplished scene-stealer but he’s in too many scenes this time around. By far the best is the last one in which he appears. After graduating, Julie bumps into Patrick one night in central London. He tells her he abandoned his latest project when he was deprived of artistic control and asks, of her graduation piece, ‘Did you resist the temptation to be obvious?’ She feels able to reply honestly that she did. For once, Patrick is quiet and laconic, as he accepts what she says – and when she brings up the subject of Anthony – or tries to. ‘Anthony was a drug addict’, Patrick replies, more in sorrow than in anger but conclusively, and goes on his way.
I expected to miss Tom Burke’s toxic, amusing, charismatic Anthony but missed him less because Hogg makes his absence central to the narrative. It’s a bit disappointing, though, that, when Burke makes a guest appearance in the climax to Part II, it’s to play a wordless Anthony. At the public screening of Julie’s graduation film, after the film school head has admitted he and his colleagues were wrong to doubt her and Julie has come to the stage to say a few words, the audience settles down to watch. (Her proud parents are there, both looking forward to finding out what exactly their daughter has been up to for the last few years.) What Julie sees, however, and what Hogg shows her audience, is a film fantasy of Julie’s life with Anthony, featuring Burke and, in a variety of costumes, Honor Swinton Byrne. This is a kind of dream ballet – without the dancing – but more compelling and less interruptive to the narrative proper than traditional dream ballets tended to be. The sequence is the culmination of the frequently ingenious and beautiful image-making by Hogg and her DP David Raedeker that is a hallmark of the film.
The exception to Hogg’s eschewal of exact dating of events comes when Julie, in tears, watches television news coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Part one was definitely set in the mid-1980s, with its references to the IRA bombing of Harrods and the Libyan Embassy siege. Coming at the very end of the decade, the Wall’s fall might seem to close off the two films neatly as an eighties story but Hogg continues beyond then, illustrating the next stage of Julie’s career, as she goes on to make music videos (as Hogg did in the 1990s) and becomes ever more socially assured. As soon as she’s able to do so, Julie repays the £10,000 she borrows from her mother earlier in the film. (It’s a nice touch that Rosalind protests only very briefly before accepting the cheque.) Just as you’re beginning to wonder if Hogg is uncertain how to end the film, she wraps it up smartly. The fitting last word – uttered perhaps by an off-screen Julie but more likely by Hogg herself – is ‘Cut!’
I have to close on my favourite scene of all. I don’t know why but I’ve always been entertained by screen drama’s obedience to Anton Chekhov’s pistol-on-the-wall dictate[1] in relation to precious ornaments – the convention whereby one character conveys their attachment to, say, a delicate glass vase and another character, who doesn’t share that attachment, duly smashes it. The sequences involving Julie and her parents in The Souvenir Part II are consistently strong – Tilda Swinton is marvellous and has a splendid partner in James Spencer Ashworth, as her calm, genial farmer husband – but Joanna Hogg’s twist on the glass vase convention is definitely the highlight. At the breakfast table in her parents’ Norfolk home, Julie surprises her mother by declining the offer of sugar for her coffee, explaining that she no longer takes it. A few seconds pass before William, quietly amused, tells his daughter, ‘You missed the significance of the bowl’. In the first film, Rosalind expressed interest in doing a ceramics course as a mature student; she has now duly enrolled and the proffered sugar bowl is the first piece that she’s made. There’s a bit of light-hearted conversation about Rosalind’s pride in her creation and its ‘Etruscan handles’. In a later teatime scene between mother and daughter, Rosalind’s three springer spaniels[2] are sniffing round the tray; she asks Julie to move a plate of biscuits and the sugar bowl out of harm’s way, with inevitable results: Julie misjudges the edge of the mantelpiece and the bowl crashes into the hearth below. Inevitable but I didn’t see this coming and gasped audibly.
What follows is so richly credible and true to the three characters concerned that the fate of the sugar bowl turns out to be one of the most brilliant film breakages I can remember seeing. Julie is distraught and repeatedly apologetic. Rosalind, although deeply upset, puts a brave face on it and is anxious that the dogs don’t hurt themselves on the shards; she cuts her own finger in the process of removing them. Best of all are William’s three one-liners, and the trajectory of his well-meant remarks. Hearing a commotion, he enters the room, sees the damage and exclaims, ‘Oh, not the Etruscan pot!’ A minute or so later, with the debris cleared, he reassures his wife and daughter, ‘Worse things happen at sea’. Once Rosalind has exited with the dustpan, he confides in Julie, ‘Don’t worry – she can make another one’.
9 February 2022
[1] ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.’
[2] Dora, Rosy and Snowbear – joint winners of the 2021 Palm Dog at Cannes, where the film premiered …