The Souvenir

THE SOUVENIR   ***

Joanna Hogg

2019

IDEA:  A film school student from a wealthy family falls in love with an older man in 1980s London.

BLURB:  The Souvenir is a film-souvenir, at least for filmmaker Joanna Hogg. As it transpires in its protracted attention to the minutiae of its mise-en-scène, one gets the sense that these starkly presented images are the material of Hogg’s memories. The layout of Julie’s flat, with its paneled wall-size mirror, diminutively attached kitchen, and window overlooking a row of London rooftops, has such sensory specificity and lived-in-ness it comes to read as the real-world referent it is almost certainly designed to represent. This is not to say the film produces a documentary consciousness, but that its detailed reconstruction attunes us to Julie’s, and by extension Joanna’s, remembered experience of a time and place. It also attunes us to the emotional textures and reflections of a woman negotiating work, a rare perspective in movies. The Souvenir is most affecting when it focuses on Julie’s film school education, which we recognize as the genesis of Hogg’s own cinematic journey, and the inspiration for this picture. It’s less compelling, unfortunately, during its primary narrative focus, the toxic relationship between Julie and Anthony. However formative the impetus for this relationship might have been for Hogg, its depiction on screen is vexing, giving us an inadequate feeling for what magnetizes this young woman to this condescending fop. Their amour mal is tediously drawn out by the film’s frequently leaden airlessness. Yet it is hard to deny what this all likely means to its maker, as memoir, as release, as chronicle of an ongoing self-creation. Even if we remain outside of it, The Souvenir at least suggests what it feels like on the inside.