The Souvenir<\/em><\/strong> \u2014 British filmmaker Joanna Hogg\u2019s haunting semi-autobiographical fourth feature \u2014 takes its title from a painting Hogg was taken to see by an older man she was dating in her early 20s, while she was attending film school in London. The Rococo painting is housed in The Wallace Collection, and it depicts a young noblewoman carving the initials of her beloved into the bark of a tree, wholly consumed by her act of devotion. It\u2019s also one of the places Hogg\u2019s proxy, aspiring filmmaker Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), visits in the throes of her tumultuous love affair with Anthony (Tom Burke), an older manic-pixie-dream-man type whose approval she so desperately craves.<\/span><\/p>\n Set in the early 1980s, but without being heavy-handed about it, The Souvenir<\/em> is a dreamy but distant ode to a difficult time in Hogg\u2019s life, a testament to the ways she was shaped by this formative but ultimately fleeting relationship. The souvenirs she\u2019s taken forward with her from this relationship will lead her (and presumably Julie) to undergo extensive therapy, but they will also guide her interests and aesthetic as a filmmaker decades down the line. These weighty ideas concerning art and the artist are contemplated throughout the film: Characters spend a good deal of time discussing the importance of having experiences, whether or not it\u2019s possible to make compelling work if it\u2019s outside your own range of experience, and whether or not youthful sincerity is a boon or a curse.<\/span><\/p>\n Julie, for one, has no shortage of sincerity, but she\u2019s also lived a sheltered, privileged life in London\u2019s affluent Knightsbridge neighborhood, and she\u2019s eager to make art that goes beyond her limited scope of vision. She\u2019s attending film school and looking for support in making a gritty film set in the working-class community of Sunderland, and time and time again, she comes up against people (read: older men, both at her school and in her personal life) who ask her if it wouldn\u2019t be better for her to stick to the things she knows. \u201cAnyone can be sincere,\u201d Anthony tells Julie a bit scornfully, after she invites him to read her film proposal, and he knows he\u2019s hitting her in a particularly sensitive area with his pointed criticism that she\u2019s all too ready to accept.<\/span><\/p>\n Anthony is, in many ways, not a lover but an intellectual ideal for Julie: He has \u2014 or at least claims to have \u2014 a fancy-sounding job with the government, has decidedly highbrow taste in movies, dresses like a male resident of Grey Gardens (lots of excellent and highly eccentric vintage), is always whisking her off on capital-A Adventures, has an element of danger about him, and expresses himself with a practiced and proud arrogance that is especially impressive to artistic but naive young women. She\u2019s out of her depth \u2014 or, more to the point, is made to feel like she is \u2014 but she\u2019s more than happy to tread water and follow his lead. She doesn\u2019t necessarily want a romantic relationship with him at the outset, but for the sake of experience (and because he\u2019s exciting), she allows him to insinuate himself into her life and then into her bed.<\/span><\/p>\n What she doesn\u2019t realize, despite warning signs that will be obvious to anyone who\u2019s ever lived with an addict, is that he\u2019s got a major heroin problem (she only finds this out via a conversation with a hilariously pretentious friend of his; fine work, Richard Ayoade). Hogg does a masterful job at capturing the jagged rhythm of this type of relationship. There are days of calm between them that Julie chooses to remember and idealize, and then there are spurts of violence that she\u2019d rather forget. Hogg and cinematographer David Raedeker show flashes of the worst between the characters, but they prefer to linger on the aftermath \u2014 a mirror that\u2019s intact throughout most of the film and then ominously cracked in the background of a later shot; a ragged note for Anthony left flapping in the wind on Julie\u2019s door when he doesn\u2019t come home. These are the kinds of images that last in a person\u2019s mind, even decades down the line after the rest of the story begins to fall away \u2014 the kinds of images our minds don\u2019t delete in the self-editing process. <\/span><\/p>\n Fittingly, Hogg presents the story of their coming together and eventual unraveling in a non-linear fashion, as if she and Julie are dusting out the deepest corners of their intertwined subconscious, conjuring faded but still raw decades-old memories directly onto the screen and examining them from a safe distance. Distance is consistently prized in Hogg\u2019s aesthetic, even as she\u2019s weaving this incredibly intimate tale for us: Characters are shot within a single frame while in different rooms, and are rarely captured in close-ups. Julie is constantly observing the tumult of the outside world (even the 1983 car bombing at Harrod\u2019s) from the tiny window of her posh studio apartment. The characters are rarely glimpsed outside, and there are so many doors being constantly closed and opened.<\/span><\/p>\n Obviously, none of this would work if it weren\u2019t for the compelling performances of the actors we\u2019re trapped in these spaces with. Burke is so fearless in his performance as this highly unsympathetic, highly calculating character, and Swinton Byrne (yes, daughter of Tilda, who turns in a marvelous against-type performance in a supporting role here) turns in a shockingly assured debut performance as a young woman who is anything but. Here\u2019s looking to The Souvenir: Part II…<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n The Souvenir \u2014 British filmmaker Joanna Hogg\u2019s haunting semi-autobiographical fourth feature \u2014 takes its title from a painting Hogg was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":568,"featured_media":11919,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: A<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 59 min.; rated R for some sexuality, graphic nudity, drug material and language<\/em><\/h5>\n
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