That Joanna Hogg’s latest film is named after Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s famed painting, “The Souvenir,” is a fitting homage to the pining nature of the movie’s heroine (a term that is rife with meaning in this case), Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne). As a character based on Hogg herself, and the experiences she went through in film school, including taking up with an older, “more sophisticated” man–called Anthony (Tom Burke) in The Souvenir–there is a rogue form of cinéma vérité at play. One that often veers toward the brutally meta (like how Tilda Swinton, who plays Julie’s mother, Rosalind, went to the same film school as Hogg at the time, and witnessed the relationship The Souvenir details as it unfolded).
Told in a flood of largely nonlinear but still interconnected memories, Hogg’s method for preparing her lead actress (who also conveniently happens to be the daughter of Tilda Swinton) involved giving Byrne some diaries and old scripts of hers from the 1980s to improvise when other actors (with their own lines pre-memorized) would interact with her. Burke, too, was provided with drawings by and recordings of the man Anthony is based on. Anthony who seems so refined and worldly to someone as sheltered and impressionable as Julie. Yet, like Simone Weil, her cushioned existence is something she resents, wishes to shirk in any way possible. Which is why, through the medium of film, she believes she can better learn to understand and interact with the common man. Consumed with fulfilling her vision for a plot pertaining to a son’s obsession with his mother (a theme she explains to a radio interviewer at the outset of the film, indicating that she did manage to get the project off the ground with success), Julie gradually then quickly becomes consumed instead with Anthony. It doesn’t help her goner status that he’s the first person to tell her that she’s special, something one would think a child of rich parents would already assume. But not Julie, who insists to Anthony at a party, “I think I’m quite average.” He backhandedly compliments her, “You’re not average. You’re lost and you’ll always be lost.” While most people eventually allow themselves to be backed into a corner by life, without the luxury of being eternally wayward, Anthony can see that the cushion of Julie’s wealth will forever prevent her from “having to” do anything.
This is the foremost reason why she permits herself to fall down the rabbit hole despite all the red flags Anthony emits as her “mentor” (a dynamic that, in many ways, echoes the adversarial one between Reynolds Woodcock and Alma Elson in Phantom Thread). She has the rich girl’s privilege of doing so; or, as it is phrased in a film that Anthony might quote to her, Death Laid An Egg, “Love is the biggest luxury of all.” Indulging in it, let alone gorging on it, is so often the rite of passage of the affluent artist (and even the poor one, if Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe count). So it is that she must oblige the artist’s journey, regardless of soon being unable to ignore the very large elephant in the room: Anthony’s heroin addiction. An elephant introduced by Patrick (Richard Ayoade) at an intimate soiree attended solely by him and his wife, Anthony and Julie. Patrick, blunt and merciless in his candor, mocks the entire notion of film school, in addition to those, like Anthony, who try to teach what film is. Having himself attended, he states that the best thing about it is the access to camera equipment. But someone telling you how to make a film, well, that’s like them telling you how to breathe. One must simply be instinctual and unthinking about it. A concept that goes rather in direct contrast to Alfred Hitchcock’s near obsessive compulsive meticulousness in mapping out every shot, an auteur who naturally gets a nod in one of the classes Julie is taking. Not to mention the Psycho-like overtones of her own film premise. But Julie will still have much to learn about unlearning film school doctrine. In the meantime, Patrick slaps her nonchalantly with the information about Anthony’s heroin dependency, as though surely she must have known already. It’s so obvious, after all. Why else would he have fresh track marks on his arm after having sex with her (perhaps deliberately distracting her with the gift of lingerie brought from Paris beforehand)? His constant disappearances and demands for money can now no longer be ignored in her mind. So instead, she embraces the addiction. Panders to it so as to keep her own: Anthony.
In one of the earlier vignettes from their relationship at a time when it was still blossoming instead of decaying, the two roam through The Wallace Collection together, eventually stopping to stare at the Fragonard painting. That the woman in it carving her lover’s initials into a tree is named Julie, after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eponymous character in Julie, or the New Heloise, intensifies the sentiment of the image as Anthony explains it to her. While Julie interprets it as an image of sadness, Anthony, in contrast, sees it as one of hope, for she appears “determined, and very much in love.”
But it is that love that steadfastly wears upon Julie’s filmic determination as she pours everything she has, including her mother’s money, into sustaining it. While Anthony has the gall to say such subtext-laden things as, “I’m on a ledge. I’ve got nowhere left to go.” This told to her when they’re still attempting to share a platonic bed and he further titillates her with a reference to It Happened One Night by building a “Wall of Jericho” between them. Of course, the wall is already there on a figurative level anyway, for Anthony will never be honest with her. Will never explain his commitment to another mistress, even if not in human form.
The backdrop of the 80s in London serves as something of its own character as errant bombs go off or are alluded to, harkening back to a time when the terroristic threats of the INRA and IRA were omnipresent in the city. As for the posh apartment Julie has, it is an almost exact re-creation, with Hogg having it built inside of a hangar and projecting images of the original views she had via pictures she took at the time. Indeed, the ephemera of her past is integral to the film’s authentic feeling, the one that resonates with so many of us who have fallen prey to the first love inevitability of turning toxic. Particularly when it is a woman’s first love, but not a man’s. This much is evidenced in a scene between them in what appears to be Anthony’s favorite bougie tea room, at which time Julie probes him about his past loves. He admits there were three before her, much to her jealous dismay. Vexed by what he perceives as her childishness, he chastises, “Stop torturing yourself. Stop inviting me to torture you.” That line is the crux of their entire dynamic, however, with Julie taking a strange self-flagellating pleasure in letting Anthony hurt her. In knowing that she can only get hurt in the end. And no amount of playing Bauhaus or The Fall can make it go away. Maybe only, instead, taking her broken heart and turning it into art, as Carrie Fisher once sanctioned. Yet even that reductively reduces what The Souvenir manages to do–that rare and almost impossible thing in film: actually re-create a human experience and the emotions tied to it as it occurred through the impressionistic kaleidoscope of what it is to remember. That alone makes Hogg a visionary in cinema.
