The Souvenir

Postcards from your younger self

Originally printed in Compass, june 12, 2019.

Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “When you are 17 you aren’t really serious,” and Taylor Swift wrote, “Everything will be alright, if we just keep dancing like we’re 22.” But the trouble with turning 25 is that no matter how much you dance or how unserious you are, the clay begins to harden, and the things — and the people — that happen to you get stuck within the little crevices. They harden too; trapped within you and impossible to extract. This is how you become a person. And, if you’re lucky, an artist.

Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical Künstlerroman, darkly titled “The Souvenir,” looks back at a pivotal heartbreak in her life, when she was 25 in 1980s London.  It’s a peculiar courtship with a slightly older man that coincides with a formative year at film school as her dedication to her career wavers.  Whether her younger self will absorb the art and lessons and pain of love as a process for blooming, both as a person and as a filmmaker, or if her rose will be lopped off as a bud is the question the film both poses and answers. 

As Hogg’s stand-in, Julie, Honor Swinton Byrne deftly plays the girl in school everyone secretly can’t stand. This is hardly shown in the film, but c’mon, we must know it to be true. Julie’s not just tall, she’s a long-legged Greek statue of Diana. She’s not just beautiful, she’s coolly innocent in a way that to pay her a compliment would give you the smugness of discovery. She’s not just quietly rich, she owns her chiclylocated Knightsbridge apartment. She’s not just unsure, she verbally trips and recoils trying to explain the feature she wants to direct, particularly in front of the school board. She’s not just vaguely interested in the aesthetic storytelling appeal of poverty, she — no, in that instance it’s just that.

Initially she would appear to be perfect quarry for Anthony (Tom Burke), irregularly faced and silvery tongued, who seems at once to have stepped off stage from an Oscar Wilde production and to be someone you wouldn’t want to turn a corner and meet in a dark alley. How he wows Julie, this James Bond villain, out to lunch with his simpering pussy-cat smile, Windsor knots and cigarettes, as they meet in cavernous dining club rooms, half bickering with no one else seated close enough to hear. But her devotion to him, something between a warm friendship and first love, makes her a disarming match for whatever practiced provocation he might unsheathe. 

Hogg may be daring us to dully ask, “What does she see in him?” — the lies, the criticism, what must be a pungent combination of ash, sweat and a Pour Monsieur eau de toilette. Likely this is the inner thought of Julie’s mother (played by Swinton Byrne’s own, Tilda Swinton), who, trained from her upbringing to be as polite and steadfast as her past-the-knee Glen Check skirts, would never vocalize such concern outright. But on the other hand, what does Anthony see in Julie? We are not asked to fall in love with these characters, only to witness intimacy unfold, in both its rituals (the lovers’ trips, the lingerie gifts), and its more sour, wounding effects. 

That Julie can just exist, can invite this poison in and hold such affection for it without begging the audience for sympathy — there’s no show of her exaggerated wit or cool-weirdo-girl badge of honor here — is a triumph of the film. 

We are most mysterious to ourselves, and Hogg has distanced herself enough from her 20s to truly present Julie as a separate entity. So much so that in literary terms, the character sketch feels distinctly written in third person. 

“The Souvenir” doesn’t jut out from the heart. It’s not a fresh wound hastily logged in a diary. There’s a clarity that comes from time passing, even as the rationales behind feelings and actions dissolve. Why did I do that? Why was I with him? Was it how he spoke? Was it how lonely I really was? 

Hogg allows her film to observe instead of explain, as if an unseen sister were telling you about that one year, if you recall, with Julie and her special friend. She wasn’t present for all of it, but she knows what happened and knows her sister well enough to sketch in the likely details. That distance, remembering without over contextualizing, allows for many things, including free speculation, stretches of boredom and occasionally surprise. 

If there’s a strange sizzle to the slow pace, it’s watching a woman ruminating on her own life as an act of self-betrayal. Julie with her artistic determination to escape her protected, pinprick world of privilege and make a film about tragic young boys and decaying shipping ports seems like the last person who would want to be the heroine of her own tale. It’s a measured tribute to her 20s, in defiance of the idealism of her 20s, and a story not fully told. Already, Hogg is in production with “The Souvenir Part II.”