The Souvenir
Joanna Hogg, UK/US
Given the evidence of Federico Fellini’s
BY ROBERT KOEHLER 8½ (1963) and François Truffaut’s Day for
Night (1974), time isn’t kind to moviemakers
who decide to leap into autobiography: too
often, such an endeavour entails rampant
solipsism, a romanticization of history, and
getting the practice of moviemaking (and
cinema itself) entirely wrong. When they too
gave in to the impulse to look in the mirror,
Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard took the
craftier route of the auto-essay, a gambit that
allows the artist to simultaneously author
the work and get out of the way. Here, the
voice of the author in direct exchange with
the audience replaces the dramatized, una-
voidably phony version of the author’s life; a
conversation takes the place of an ego trip (or
as much as one can ever have a conversation
with such Olympian and reclusive figures as
Marker and Godard).
The significance of Joanna Hogg’s The
Souvenir is that we now have another writ-
er-director who’s found a way out of the
traps of dramatized memoir, even as her own
history largely followed the same trajecto-
ry as that of her protagonist, Julie (Honor
Swinton Byrne), who is struggling through
her studies at the fictitious Raynham Film
School in the early ’80s. After completing
her own studies, Hogg landed a fairly suc-
cessful career as a director-for-hire on such
British TV series as London Bridge, London’s
Burning, and EastEnders. She left TV behind
in 2007 to make her interesting, nuanced
first feature, Unrelated, which she followed
with Archipelago (2010). Evincing a clear
influence from the Berlin School (in their
de-dramatized tone and use of a mid-range
camera that takes in the full bodies of the
performers and their surroundings), these
first two features exude the tensile strength
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and focus of a fine string quartet work: while
both centre on a woman in transition (played
by Kathryn Worth in the former and Kate
Fahy in the latter), they also expertly sketch
out the interactions and exchanges between
a particular circle of people (i.e., people with
money and the ability to get away to leisurely
locations).
Hogg shifted from this character web with
Exhibition (2013), which is set mostly in the
flat of two married, well-off London artists,
the distaff half of which (played by Slits gui-
tarist Viv Albertine) is contending with both
her internal creative process and enigmatic
external threats—a move from the extensive
to the intensive that revealed a certain dis-
comfort in Hogg’s handling of fewer charac-
ters. If The Souvenir can be best understood
in the context of Exhibition—given its focus
on a contemporary woman artist juggling
her artistic and personal lives—it’s less a do-
over than yet another bold (and this time,
more successful) shift in approach, even as
Hogg reasserts some of the key strengths of
her first two films: her well-honed deploy-
ment of shock cuts and tendency to drop
the viewer into a scene in medias res; and,
by giving each person who matters in Julie’s
life—including her mother (played by Tilda
Swinton, leading lady Byrne’s mother and
Hogg’s longtime friend), her Tory-ish father,
her friends, fellow students, and teachers—
their own moments inside the story, her
expansion of what might have been an ex-
tremely inward drama into a broader view
of an ’80s England engulfed in the Northern
Irish Troubles.
The opening images of The Souvenir are
rough, black-and-white photos of the dying
industrial town of Sunderland, which are
revealed to be Julie’s research material for
her initial thesis-film idea: a Loachian dra-
ma about a working-class lad whose mother
is dying, a far cry from Julie’s own reality as
a privileged young woman living off her folks’
money in tony Knightsbridge. Following this
cold open, the film sticks close to its protago-
nist’s point of view, with a roving camera that
follows Julie through the house party she’s
hosting, where she first encounters Anthony
(Tom Burke), a civil servant in the Foreign
Office with whom she enters into an unlike-
ly courtship. Hogg’s early predilection for
ensemble construction grows more complex
and multilayered here, as she gradually maps
out the assorted (male) influences bearing
down on Julie: from her conversations with
Anthony, who offers some surprisingly solid
advice about how to develop artistic confi-
dence; to an amusing dinner party that is
dominated by Anthony’s jaded filmmaker
acquaintance Patrick (Richard Ayoade), who
tells Julie that film school is a total con and
nothing more than a low-cost supply centre
for equipment; to scenes with Julie in class
with her teachers and mates, where things
are actually learned and applied.
It is ultimately these latter scenes—par-
ticularly one in which Julie and her class-
mates watch one of their teachers’ own
documentaries, about legendary jazz drum-
mer Art Blakey’s mentoring of young play-
ers—that gradually and cumulatively reveal
Hogg’s intent. Above all else, and contra
Patrick’s blanket dismissal of film school,
The Souvenir is about learning: about how a
woman with a camera (both Julie and Hogg)
undertakes the extremely difficult work of
recalibrating her artistic mission and con-
fronting the things that truly matter to her.
Heeding her teachers’ suggestions that her
initial proposal is rather distant from her
own experiences, Julie works through suc-
cessive drafts of the project until she makes
her own breakthrough in cinema form and
language: a camera trained on a solo female
actor reciting, first, from a Shakespearean
text, and then, in the finale, from Christina
Rossetti’s “Song,” a verse reflecting on a
painful farewell.
This is about as far from a Sunderland
kitchen-sink drama as one can imagine, and
it is also what makes The Souvenir the anti-
8½: where the latter ends with a forced at-
tempt to magically resolve the self-created
problems of a director whose only point of
reference is his own stunted self, the former
is about a burgeoning artistic life overcom-
ing both personal limitations and outside
distractions. It’s also about building a sur-
vivor’s thick skin, in life as well as art. Julie
doesn’t know how to deal with the imposing
Anthony, who threatens to consume her life
not only with his dominant personality and
seeming wisdom, but also with the demons
he conceals from her view, both profession-
al (his ambiguous involvement in the British
government’s handling of the Troubles) and
personal (he’s a closet junkie).
When Julie learns of Anthony’s addiction
via a throwaway comment from Patrick, she
reacts with a stare of frozen shock, as if she’s
entered into a new territory without a map—
and, since Hogg never overtly announces
that her film is a memoir (the title refers to
a Fragonard miniature that Anthony shows
to Julie early in their courtship), she leaves
eerily open the possibility that Julie and
Anthony’s relationship might be a fatal case
of liebestod. (The hints of this come through
in foreboding shots of a Venice canal that
precede a disastrous lovers’ holiday, capped
with a night at the opera for Verdi’s La forza
del destino.) Maintaining this narrative ten-
sion to the very end, in a manner reminis-
cent of Christian Petzold (another resolute
formalist who doesn’t abjure the classical
pleasures of suspense), Hogg achieves a bal-
ance of aggressive stylistic tropes, expert
storytelling control, and a careful courting
of audience engagement (“Engagement, not
escapism,” as Julie defines it at one point)
that suggests a way forward for contempo-
rary narrative cinema.
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