In 2019, A24 released The Souvenir, British filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical tale about a young, upper class woman involved with an older man.
She also has to face their evaluations of her as both a director and a person when she takes on the project of her very intimate graduate film.
But The Souvenir Part II—a continuation of the story, though Hogg has been averse to labeling it a sequel—is, to me, the more winning of the diptych.
Cassie da Costa: To me, Part II is a more rigorous extension of the first, in that we see Julie forced to finally collaborate with her classmates in a bid to make her graduation film.
I both loved and loathed watching her clash with her classmates; loved because it was so naturalistic and rich with tension, loathed because Hogg’s portrait of grad school is rendered with painful accuracy.
One area I know you and I feel different, though, aboutdiffer in opinion on is in Hogg’s choice to move awaydeparture from the well-lit naturalism of apartments and corridors and into theatrical abstraction, replaying Julie’s experiences as a kind of nightmarish but also dreamlike passage.
This passage, near the end of the film, brings to life Julie’s defiant statement to her professors during that roundtable—where she essentially says,: To heavily paraphrase, “I don’t want to make films that are exactly like life.; I want to make the things I imagined in my head.” Hogg’s films, in general, can be deeply naturalistic, rooted into what feels like “real,” accessible imagery.
It’s beautifully made and unpredictable, a fun change of pace from the rest of the film.
That said, I did appreciate other moments that felt like a break in tone, a sly step into another kind of movie.
da Costa: I’m also sad that we didn’t get Robert Pattinson in this movie! My thought was he might have worked well in Joe Alwyn’s part,; though I have to say Alwyn was a lovely diversion for a moment there.
His petulant, moody, outright rude, and always hilarious Patrick is an unapologetically excessive filmmaker who has perhaps the most withering takes on cinema you’ll get outside of certain misanthropic corners of Ffilm Twitter.
What did you think of Swinton Byrne’s performance? She has a tough job in many ways, playing such a reserved, shaky person yet having to hold the film together as the lead.
That, coupled with the fact that Hogg doesn’t write traditional screenplays—, but instead writes free-flowing documents full of ideas and inspiration, calling upon her actors to feel their way through the scenes in order to devise the dialogue—, renders her workit all the more adroit in retrospect.
Of course, it probably also helps that Swinton Byrne’s background is similar to Hogg’s, and that she comes from a somewhat similar, affluent background to Hogg, which she can feed directly into the role.
When women make personal films, there’s always a lot of emphasis in the press on the idea of autobiography; in books, too, the memoir is, at this point, a feminine form.
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