A filmmaking life gets a sequel
A young woman finds her way in “Souvenir Part II”
Sequels and spinoffs and origin stories fill the multiplexes, but it’s vanishingly rare to see two feature-length dramas centered on the same real-world character. Enter “The Souvenir,” two films directed by Joanna Hogg on a subject that’s also not common onscreen: a young woman finding her way in life and coming into her own.
In “The Souvenir,” released in 2019, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a film school student in 1980s London. Her relationship with Anthony, a witty, debonair older man, goes off the rails as it emerges that he’s addicted to heroin. “The Souvenir Part II,” which opened Friday, follows a solo Julie working out her voice as a person and as a director — a new rich chapter of experience where a single film might have declared “The End.”
“You don’t normally have that opportunity with the story, to have a break in the middle and think about what you’re doing and approach things differently the second way,” Hogg said the day after her movie’s New York Film Festival premiere last month. (Part II takes place only a few days after Part I but was shot two years later.)
Until recently, her films have been like a muchbeloved secret.
Her fans include Ari Aster, director of “Midsommar,” who said in an email, “At her best, she lends a subtle, deeply individual strangeness to the quotidian.” He praised her as “a fastidious and texture-obsessed diarist in the best sense.” Another fan: Barack Obama, who counted “Part I” among his favorite movies of 2019.
Julie’s story draws closely on Hogg ’s memories. Like Julie, Hogg studied filmmaking in the 1980s, at the National Film and Television School in England, and dated a devastatingly charming man with an all-consuming drug addiction. And Julie’s background, like Hogg ’s, is solidly upper middle class. Visits to the country home of Julie’s parents punctuate both films; artifacts, clothing and photos from Hogg ’s life appear throughout, too. “Part I” broaches the notion of privilege, as Julie faces teachers skeptical of her initial proposal to make a film about a struggling port city. “Part II” sees her coming out of her shell and, as Hogg put it, “joining the world, joining life.”
Hogg went on to a career in British television and did not direct her first theatrical feature until 2007 at age 47: “Unrelated,” starring Tom Hiddleston, also making his feature debut. “The Souvenir Part II” imagines a different trajectory for Julie, giving her a freedom Hogg did not have at the time.
“I didn’t get to make a film at film school that spoke about the relationship that I’d been in,” the director said. Friendly and low-key in a subdued dark top and pants, she chose her words firmly but with a dry sense of understatement that would fit without a rustle right into a Joanna Hogg film.
“It was important for her to be less naïve and therefore more in control of her life and therefore her story.”
The ties of friends and family are further entwined through Hogg ’s cast. The director knew Swinton Byrne as the daughter of an old schoolmate, Tilda Swinton. (Hogg is Swinton Byrne’s godmother.) Swinton starred in Hogg ’s real graduate film, “Caprice,” and plays Julie’s doting mother in both parts of “The Souvenir.”
Yet Swinton Byrne was cast less than a month before shooting on “Part I” began. Hogg was visiting Swinton about playing Julie’s mother but still didn’t have a Julie.
“I was getting onto a train to go back to London, and Honor was arriving from London coming home,” Hogg said. The two chatted on the platform about “what it is to be in your early 20s,” and for Hogg it just “clicked.”
“I feel like I was very like Julie when I was a bit younger. You know how insecure it is,” Swinton Byrne, 23, said.
Swinton Byrne’s Julie reckons with the past in “The Souvenir Part II” but spends a lot of time on a sound stage, leading her crew and explaining motivations to her actors. (Her classmates include a hilariously biting Richard Ayoade.)
Hogg “dramatizes the fragmentary life of the imagination, completing a story that was full of hesitations in the first place,” critic Molly Haskell said in an email, invoking Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. “The only remotely analogous cinematic experiment of recent years is Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ trilogy.”