Joanna Hogg (2019)
As a Sight & Sound (August 2019) interview made clear, Joanna Hogg’s fourth feature draws on her own experiences as a film school student in the early 1980s, and an important relationship that she had at the time. Her alter ego in The Souvenir is Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), who lives in a Knightsbridge flat owned by her rich, Norfolk-dwelling parents but is keen to broader her social horizons. Uniquely posh among the staff and students of the fictional Raynham Film School (Hogg attended the National Film and Television School), Julie tells a succession of people of her plans to film a story set in Sunderland, where industrial decline is taking hold. They include a local radio interviewer in the North East, her sceptical tutors at the film school and Anthony (Tom Burke), whom Julie meets at a party. Somewhat older than her, he too is posh and his parents well to do (although, when Julie meets them, it turns out his mother’s a northerner and his father an admirer of Tyne and Wear shipyards). Julie’s lodger moves out of the Knightsbridge flat and Anthony moves in. They’re soon sleeping together in her ornate double bed. Anthony works at the Foreign Office. He’s also a heroin addict, although he presents his drug-buying outings as hush-hush FO assignments.
Hogg’s early sequences set the scene efficiently but The Souvenir feels anticipatory for quite a time – until the central relationship starts to engage. It does that partly because it’s a puzzle as to what Julie wants or gets from it. Anthony is clever and witty but hardly irresistible to a girl seemingly eager to contradict expectations of who she is and what she’s attracted to. His default attitude is one of arrant, bored contempt, sometimes directed at Julie. An expert in giving with one hand and taking away with the other, he invites her on a trip to Venice before telling her he’s been there three times before, once with a girlfriend he would never see again, as her suicide note made clear. To finance his drugs habit, he’s soon sponging off Julie – to be more accurate, from her mother Rosalind (Tilda Swinton), whose daughter repeatedly tells her she needs the funds for film-making equipment. Yet although the uncertain, acquiescent Julie appears to be on the receiving end of Anthony, there’s a persisting sense that he sees her as stronger than he is. The first hint of this comes on the couple’s visit to the Wallace Collection, where they look at the Fragonard painting from which the film takes its name. There’s an implicit kinship between Fragonard’s model and Hogg’s protagonist. The girl in ‘Le souvenir’, who looks sad to Julie, strikes Anthony as determined.
The art gallery isn’t the only locus of studied compositions in The Souvenir. Halting conversations that fizzle out aren’t in short supply either. Both characteristics call to mind Joanna Hogg’s previous feature Exhibition (2013) yet this new film, unlike its predecessor, is far from an ordeal. This is down to two main factors. It may or may not be because the story is essentially autobiographical that Hogg’s treatment of her characters is more generous. And this time, she has some proper actors in important parts. My understanding is that, as usual, she gave her cast a detailed scenario within which to come up with their own lines. If so, the result is unscripted dialogue of an unusually incisive kind – including contributions from some of the smaller parts, like Julie’s father (James Spencer Ashworth). However the characterisations were devised, the acting is very well orchestrated.
Hogg’s NFTS graduation piece featured the young and unknown Tilda Swinton and their reunion here is a happy one. Rosalind is intelligent yet oblivious, her mother love unquestionable and infantilising; Swinton plays her with sympathetic precision. Twenty-one-year-old Honor Swinton Byrne appeared with her mother back in 2009, in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, but Julie is her first screen role since and it’s an appealing debut. She has an inchoate quality that clearly suits Hogg’s purpose and which may not be acting but Swinton Byrne realises Julie’s painful doubts and apprehensions deftly, and she’s likeable. One of the strongest dramatic moments comes when Rosalind relays to Julie the phone message that Anthony has died of a drugs overdose (in the toilets of the Wallace Collection). It’s the older woman who’s more shocked and upset. Julie is now sadder and wiser than when she met Anthony. Rosalind lies down on the vacant side of her daughter’s bed. Julie reaches out an arm to touch her mother’s back, and console her.
The versatile Tom Burke is ingenious as Anthony. Within what might have been the straitjacket of a cafard-heavy monotone, he achieves wonderfully acute inflections. He’s often funny – as, for example, when Anthony, more good-humoured than usual and to Julie’s amusement, insists on a fairer division of double bed territory. Later, when she visits him in rehab and he assures her he’s now fine, Tom Burke’s eyes are a powerful contradiction of Anthony’s words. Richard Ayoade supplies an expert, scene-stealing cameo as a fast-talking, know-it-all film-maker, even though the effect is more sharply, narrowly satirical than anything else in The Souvenir.
Hogg has fashioned a strong period piece. This is an era of call boxes, smoking in restaurants and IRA bombings: Julie and her flat are shaken by the explosion outside nearby Harrods. Anthony claims that events at the Libyan Embassy are taking up much of his time at work. (Hogg doesn’t seem too concerned about accurate chronological order: the Embassy siege of spring 1984 takes place before the Harrods bombing of December 1983.) The soundtrack includes a well-chosen selection of early eighties pop, along with a few older numbers: Glenn Miller’s ‘Moonlight Serenade’ (a favourite of Rosalind’s) and, as a supplement to the title, Jessie Matthews singing ‘Souvenir of Love’.
The Souvenir holds one’s attention but it does so at (at least) one remove. In her S&S interview with Nick James, Joanna Hogg described how making the film was a process of discovery for her – about the workings of memory, and the extent of her identification with Julie:
‘Sometimes my frustration is that I want to remember more and simply can’t. In making the film, I found there are memories there if you dig deep enough. Things have come up that I didn’t realise I knew. …There was a certain point at which I thought of the character as opposed to myself, but I’m not always thinking about my own experience. … I’ve got to allow new things to come in. So even if it starts very close to home, it’s never going to end up that way. It becomes something else … which is much more about getting something to feel real when it’s in front of me.’
Hogg communicates more in this interview than she does through the film she’s made. It isn’t dull to watch – partly thanks to the acting, partly because its incommunicado quality turns the viewer as self-reflective as the auteur: you find yourself thinking about what you expect to get out of a story like this, conscious that you’re not often getting it.
On Rotten Tomatoes, The Souvenir currently has a critics’ fresh rating of 90% and an audience approval score of 33%. The public isn’t always right but the large discrepancy does, I think, reflect Joanna Hogg’s exclusive approach to film-making and the high Tomatometer reading the perennial susceptibility of professional reviewers to (a) work as scrupulously artful as Hogg’s and (b) films that foreground film-making. The Souvenir is altogether superior to Exhibition but the portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-woman reading of it, which is widespread, derives more from prior knowledge of its autofictive nature than from what Hogg has put on the screen.
Julie’s cultural appetite helps elevate the tone of proceedings, makes her poetry-reading voiceovers easier to accept, and justifies a bit near the end when she films another student doing one of Isabella’s speeches from Measure of Measure. But these things are decorative. There’s so little illustration of the creative effects on Julie of her affair with Anthony that she might as well have been a shop assistant as an aspiring film-maker. Joanna Hogg conceived The Souvenir as a diptych and the second part of Julie’s story is now in production. As a pair, the films may turn out to justify the praise that some reviews have lavished on the first of them. For now, the critics concerned are jumping the gun.
5 September 2019
