The Souvenir: Part II - Twice the Swintons, in an Impressive Sequel About Turning Grief Into Art

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-plus

One of the most memorable independent films of 2019, was The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg’s autobiographically inspired story of a film student, Julie Harte, who falls in love with a mysterious older man, Anthony (Tom Burke) who dies of a heroin overdose. 

It is a portrait of the artist in her youth, a cautionary tale about the alchemy of grief, turned into art in a film that seemed entirely self-contained.

Julie has returned to us, in  The Souvenir: Part II, which was conceived in tandem with the first film, but in a less sombre register.

Julie ((Honor Swinton Byrne) is fretted over in her grief by her mother (Tilda Swinton)

Instead, it’s a film in the tradition of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Francois Truffault’s Day For Night. It’s about filmmaking as a vocation and a way of exploring the life of emotions. The contemporary world of movies, of recycled content and franchises, seems more like an industry than the most cynical accounts of the old Hollywood studio system. Watching The Souvenir: Part II is a wonderful tonic for those feelings of ciné cynicism, a reminder of film as a means of discovery.

As we pick up the broken pieces from the last film, it’s the late ‘80s. Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne), a privileged young woman in the aftershocks of grief, is living temporarily at home with her solicitous but cautious mother, Rosalind (Swinton Byrne’s real-life mother, Tilda Swinton) and her gentleman farmer father, William (James Spencer Ashworth).

They walk on eggshells around their fragile child. In fact, one suspects they have special shoes just for that purpose. Otherwise they wear a lot of white and tweed, drink tea and have a trio of dogs and meadows full of pyrotechnic wild flowers.

Julie soon returns to her family’s Knightsbridge apartment and to school to work on her graduate thesis film, called Memorial, a salute to Anthony. 

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

In between working on her film, she occasionally visits her late boyfriend’s shrink, an older American woman (Gail Ferguson), who becomes Julie’s therapist. Periodically, as required by the school, she also works on fellow student’s projects. 

Her film professors, white-haired men who frown and purse their lips at her script, tell her that her proposed new film has no potential audience. She previously abandoned the social realist drama she was working on. Struggling to explain what she’s after, Julie responds: “I don’t want to show life as it plays out in real time.” 

Julie, introverted and pensive by nature, is pushed, bullied and embarrassed by her loneliness: She succumbs to a hasty quickie with an actor in another film, and mistakenly making a play for a sympathetic editor who turns out to be gay. 

On the set, her crew and cast are unimpressed by the texture of experience she wants to capture. In one scene, she insists to the grumbling crew that the angle is wrong because, at that moment, the camera can’t be allowed to know more than the main character does.

The tension of potential failure is palpable, though not without flashes of  humour. When she returns to her parents for a weekend, there’s a scene where she’s vomiting with the stress: We see the blue toilet lid raised surrounded by perfectly symmetrical flowered wall-paper: Her mother enters into the frame of the film, sees her daughter being sick, and tiptoes discretely away. Rosalind is far more upset when Julie accidentally breaks the “Etruscan sugar bowl” she made in pottery class. 

Julie’s conviction and confidence grow, and you watch it unfold onscreen. She rejects the suggestion of producer (Jaygann Ayeh) of a real actress in favour of another film student, Garance (Ariane Labed), who finds the character “too naïve, too fragile” to be credible, even as she’s talking to the naïve, fragile woman who wrote the script.

Her opposite here is Patrick (a terrific Richard Ayoade), a would-be Orson Welles-style boy genius in a blond afro and fur coat, drawing smoke doodles with his cigarette, and saying things like “You’re forcing me to have a tantrum!” But Patrick has his own kind of integrity, as he prepares his dance-musical extravaganza on a soundstage in widescreen, rather than like “every other fucking English film” where it’s drizzling. 

Near the end of The Souvenir: Part II, Julie encounters Patrick wandering morosely around Soho after he’s been banned from post-production of his own film. Though poles apart in style, he sees something in common with her when he asks: “Did you resist the temptation to be obvious?”The public screening of Julie’s student film, The Souvenir, is not, of course anything like Hogg’s film of 2019, made when she was in her late fifties. Instead, it’s the film in her head, a colour-saturated theatrical fantasy, very much a student film, loaded with references (The Red Shoes, Alice In Wonderland) but also representing the psychic crash of her relationship with Anthony. 

Ultimately, The Souvenir: Part II  is a film about breaking through, like the messy but systematic emergence of a bedraggled bird through the shards of a shell.

The Souvenir: Part II. Directed and written by Joanna Hogg. Starring: Honor Swinton Byrne, Jaygann Ayeh, Richard Ayoade, Ariane Labed, Tilda Swinton, James Spencer Ashworth, Charlie Heaton, Harris Dickinson, Joe Alwyn, Jack McMullen and Frankie Wilson.  The Souvenir Part II is now available in theatres.