Joanna Hogg’s entire film career has been about going against the grain. Defying the expectation that a movie needs to be “big” in order to be effective. This is something Martin Scorsese understands despite his own predilection for “big” films. Hence, the reason he reached out to Hogg after seeing her 2010 sophomore film, Archipelago, about wanting to collaborate as a producer with her. After all, Scorsese started out “quietly” as well, with Who’s That Knocking At My Door, and, despite his increasingly grandiose movies, has always appreciated the medium for what it was made for: storytelling. More specifically, telling one’s own story. No matter how personal or “specialized.” For, as Lana Del Rey’s thinking went with “The Grants,” there’s (usually) bound to be general resonance in the specific. In contrast to Del Rey, however, Hogg is aware there’s something self-indulgent to trying to make a piece of art about her relationship with her family. Namely, her mother. To capture it as she experienced it.
And yet, if one is going to try to capture an essence or feeling, Tilda Swinton is inarguably among the best actresses one can try to express it through. So confident in her former boarding school classmate’s abilities, in fact, Hogg cast Swinton in both the roles of mother and daughter, Rosalind and Julie (also the name of the lead character played by Swinton’s own daughter in The Souvenir), respectively. It is by embodying both mother and daughter that Swinton fuses the part into one dicephalous entity. Billed as a “Gothic mystery drama,” it’s apparent from the outset that there’s something slightly sinister about the remote hotel Julie takes her mother to in some quintessentially gray and eerie British countryside (the movie was actually shot in Wales).
As the pair rides along in the back of a taxi with Rosalind’s show-stealing Springer Spaniel, Louis (Swinton’s dog in actuality), the driver recounts a story of seeing a ghost at the hotel, called Moet Famau Hall (in real life, the hotel is named Soughton Hall). According to his account, “But there was something strange though, because a few months later, we were looking through our wedding photographs, and there was a picture of myself and my wife at the front of the hotel and you could see just behind us a figure of someone looking out of the window. Staring at us. Really quite scary at the time…” A side note re: the man’s wedding photos: Soughton Hall is typically a wedding venue. Best suited to such a purpose as a result of its secluded, idyllic nature. Yet, during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, such a venue was left unoccupied, making it the perfect chance to wield the milieu as Hogg and her crew’s own private shooting location (complete with building director Sarah Ramsbottom noting, “Whole rooms were being repurposed, one of the bedrooms became a prosthetics room for example. You just couldn’t do that with weddings going on”). And yes, the rich-person’s-house-turned-hotel does become a character unto itself, a key part of the haunting that Julie experiences. At first, however, it’s merely a feeling of “slight unease,” portended by the driver concluding of his ghost sighting, “So I avoid the place on dark winter nights.” And yet, lo and behold, that’s just the kind of night it is when he drops Julie and Rosalind off at the hotel.
Things get off to a rocky start when Julie proceeds to have a tense interaction with the hotel’s lone front desk receptionist (played by Carla-Sophia Davies). One in which Julie insists she telephoned well in advance to ensure she would have a first-floor room facing the “formal gardens.” The receptionist informs her that no such indication was left with her reservation, and that all they can offer her for tonight is a ground-floor room. Julie is skeptical of the receptionist’s information, remarking upon all the openly-displayed keys to presently unoccupied rooms. Indeed, it often feels as though Julie can’t tell just how much of the receptionist’s attitude stems from outright sadism or the general irritation that comes with working in hospitality and having no patience left for what Rosalind would call “fusspots.” In this manner, the receptionist is an indispensable source for building on the tension that already palpably exists between Julie and her proverbial id-meets-super-ego, Rosalind. In the end, the receptionist, who is never given a name (adding to the spectral quality of the only other “presences” on the property), capitulates to giving her a room called “Rosebud” on the first floor. Of course, it won’t be lost on cinephiles that said word is the anchor of Orson Welles’ masterpiece, Citizen Kane. A word/object that ultimately symbolized Charles Foster Kane’s (Welles) lost youth. So it is that this hotel represents both Rosalind and Julie’s lost youth, though more so the former, as it was a family residence she spent her childhood in.
Alas, while the reason that Julie decided to bring Rosalind here was because she assumed she had so many happy memories at Moet Famau Hall, Rosalind has no trouble reminding her of the many painful memories she also had while inhabiting the space. This tears Julie apart inside, due to a more than somewhat unhealthy obsession with wanting to ensure her mother is always happy and “pleased.” A state that no one can exist in, as the human condition is founded upon a far more complex spectrum of emotions. Nonetheless, this unnatural fixation on wanting to make her mother happy inevitably leads to few emotional breakdowns on Julie’s part, with one big one toward the end as she starts sobbing after her mother says she doesn’t want to eat anything for her birthday dinner. Her attachment to her mother is so strong, yet so rooted in resentment, that she finally bursts out with, “I just want you to be happy, I just—I’m trying all the time to make you happy. I can’t keep guessing. Can’t you just tell me, you just, you’re like a sort of mystery person to me. And I’ve spent all my life doing this. Trying to figure out how to make you happy.” Obviously, this is Error of the Child’s Ways 101 in terms of seeking parental approval and knowing full well it will never come. Unless you’re, say, Taylor Swift. Julie continues, “I don’t have a family beyond you. I don’t have any children [ergo, she is “The Eternal Daughter”]. And I’m not going to have anybody to fuss over me when I’m your age.” This being a dig at how she spent so much time focused on her mother that she didn’t spend enough time nurturing her own personal life, or plans for starting a family (although she does have a husband she often neglects).
The metatextual tapestry of everything collides by this moment, stemming not just from Honor Swinton Byrne playing a character called Julie in The Souvenir, but from the fact that Rosalind is rehashing all of her memories to Julie as Julie herself is experiencing these rehashings as her “memories,” or rather, hauntings. The way Julie in The Souvenir is haunted in her own way by the memory of Anthony (Tom Burke). Thus, her attempt to constantly recapture what happened between them by making a film about it. Just as the Julie of The Eternal Daughter is trying to do. For if you can document something in that way, then you can hold on to it as long as you live, even after the person is gone.
This much is mentioned when she talks to one of the hotel’s few employees, Bill (Joseph Mydell), over a glass of soothing alcohol by the fire and tells him, “I’m a filmmaker and I came here, um, with my mother to, um, to try and write a film about my mother and I. But, not easy. I—I can’t even get started.” “Why is that?” he inquires. “I think I’m not sure I feel I have a right to do such a thing. It feels like trespassing.” He assures, “I can understand you wanting to make a film about your mother to keep that sense of that relationship with her.” This said during a brief flash to her linking hands with her mother’s, markedly more aged in this particular scene to indicate that it’s another memory from a different part of their stay at the hotel together. And that Rosalind is the old woman in the window, the one the taxi driver saw haunting the place in his wedding photo.
It is by this point in the film that we can see how drinking of memory is almost like inhaling too deeply the scent of the poppy flower, getting high on its intoxicating fumes only to become perilously addicted. The past is so intermingled with the present in The Eternal Daughter that part of the “horror” of it comes from not being able to distinguish where the past ends and the present begins, hence an aphorism like, “What’s past is present.” When Julie is finally forced to acknowledge that, in her present, Rosalind isn’t really there, she’s finally able to work on the script she couldn’t start for the majority of her trip. The one that will presumably become the very film we’re watching (more meta-ness, of course).
As for those who can’t see beyond the “boring” or “quiet” nature of a Hogg film, they would do well to remember that she once said, “I wanted to make a film doing everything I was told not to do in television.” This inferring the TV expectation to be constantly “dynamic” and/or offer too much “telling” instead of “showing.”
Blending elements of The Others with The Sixth Sense, but with more sentimentality, The Eternal Daughter is, in one regard, about the horrors of being haunted by memory, and, in another, about the comfort it can bring to know that a person you love—no matter how complicated your relationship with them—will live on in your mind, and perhaps come out of it to be further immortalized through art. For, as Del Rey once said, “There’s no remedy for memory.” It’s the disease and the cure.
