Everyone is very eager to classify Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II as “a movie about making a movie.” It makes everything “neatly” identifiable, which is usually the goal of those involved in marketing and consuming entertainment, including critics. But the reductiveness of that statement takes away from what Hogg is, in some sense, trying to get across: that age-old artist’s struggle to attempt getting what they see in their mind’s eye communicated through the medium in question.
For Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), fresh from the wound of her first love’s death of a heroin overdose, the only way she can seem to think of to mitigate her pain is by expressing it through her thesis film. In “real” life, Hogg’s starred Tilda Swinton, who reappears in The Souvenir Part II as Rosalind, Julie’s mother (not much of a stretch what with Tilda being, as their shared last name indicates, Honor’s mother). In fact, the first scene of the movie is of mother and daughter in bed, with Julie casually mentioning that she hasn’t gotten her period just before her clueless father walks in bumbling about what “terrible business” it is that Anthony (Tom Burke) overdosed. Oh, the distancing language that the British upper crust can employ to make even the most gruesome of incidents seem positively “genteel.”
With the unspoken thought hanging in the air about the potential of Julie carrying Anthony’s plebeian spawn, things go on as usual at her parents’ repressed household. And one could only imagine how much more repressed it would be if Father actually knew that little tidbit about his daughter’s late period (which apparently just needed a jolt with the promise of sex that makes a girl’s rag arrive just before a “cute boy” is down to bang).
Instead, he’s awkward all on his own with an attempt to make conversation that comes off in that insulting way that only fathers know how to best inflict upon their daughters. Like when Julie comes out in a fashionable trend of the day (it’s the 80s, in case you didn’t know), and he remarks, “Nice pajamas.” She informs him, “They’re not pajamas.”
The silence that hovers over the table as they continue to eat in that dispassionate manner the British elite have mastered and seemingly passed on to white middle-class families of America is deafening. The one thing Julie wants to shout to the mountaintops is obviously about her distress, now rendered more selfish because she’s worried about the idea of being pregnant with Anthony’s child. In short, she fears she’s housing a type of ghost inside of her (this, too, has a deeper layer with regard to the spectral-like nature of Anthony’s presumed class). And why bother with that when she could simply bring her ghost to life on celluloid?
Naturally, that’s easier in theory than in practice, and as Julie sets about trying to make her first feature, she is met with negativity from everyone involved, including her advising professors, who tell her that her script is not going to translate to film, particularly as it’s not even formatted correctly (oh film school, so narrow-minded…even though you’d think all the money one pays to go would make the institution more lax about letting their students “dare to dream”). Julie remains undeterred, knowing there is always a wellspring of financing to be had from her parents. And, as most are aware, even if a project is shit, adequate financial backing to make it seem less so certainly helps. This is where the primary source of Julie’s “annoying main character syndrome” comes in—apart from how vexingly her “naïveté” (if that’s how one wants to write off a level of oblivion that extends far beyond merely being “overly sheltered”) appears to blind her to the most obvious of things.
As the film draws to a close and Julie invites Rosalind into the apartment that Anthony once robbed, Rosalind lights a cigarette. “What does Daddy feel about it?” Julie scolds her mother regarding her persistent smoking. Rosalind tellingly replies, “Daddy pretends he doesn’t know anything about it.” Just as the wealthy pretend to know nothing of the extent of everyone else’s suffering, especially for their art that they can’t disseminate as easily because marketing at the level that would make any kind of dent costs obscene amounts of dough. And, as the twentieth century and beyond has made clear: the “success” of art is based almost one hundred percent on marketing as opposed to the “goodness” of the art itself.
Julie’s station in life is arguably what made it so easy for Anthony to steal from her in the first film, in addition to asking her for money that she, in turn, requests from her parents under some other pretense. Perhaps out of guilt or a desire to remain connected to him, in The Souvenir Part II Julie still keeps in touch with Anthony’s parents. We see her visiting them at their home in one scene of the film and here it bears noting that an interpretation of The Souvenir by Cynthia Cruz in The Melancholia of Class might be slightly off the mark in assuming that Julie simply can’t see what’s right in front of her about Anthony because rich people can never process those who are “other” from them and their own lifestyle. Granted, that’s not a lie. But Anthony’s parents seem to live in an abode that looks not so different from Julie’s.
Yet the crux of Cruz insisting that Anthony is the “other”—hence his invisibility to someone like Julie—makes the presumption that his background truly was that destitute. From the looks of how his parents live, that’s not necessarily the case. However, in The Melancholia of Class, Cruz states, “Anthony attempts to pass as another social class because not to do so is to live a life on the margins, to be left outside the walls of what we are told, implicitly at least, is the world. Everywhere we look—magazines, television, movies, fashion, music, politicians—everything—all of it—originates, is made from, and thus reflects the lifestyles and values of the middle class.” The belief that Anthony is not part of that class in The Souvenir is why, as Cruz iterates, he works so diligently to dupe Julie and those in her social circle, because “to blame one’s inability to ‘succeed’ in neoliberal society (to blame systemic forces rather than one’s own personal failure) is to set one’s self outside the all-pervasive neoliberal system.” And that’s clearly not something Anthony wanted to do—or maybe it patently was, based on his desire to sign his own death warrant with a heroin addiction.
Toward the end of The Souvenir Part II, Julie questions her peacocking classmate, Patrick (Richard Ayoade), as to whether or not Anthony really did work for the Foreign Office. Patrick, who we’re already well-aware is anything but delicate or sentimental, responds without missing a beat, “Anthony was a junkie.” That’s it. That’s all there was to it. Julie’s urgent need to make meaning of Anthony and his actions are instantly bulldozed by that uncomplicated statement. And yet, if we’re to go by Cruz’s analysis, the fact that Anthony still cannot be seen as he really was even in death is yet another indication of why he felt the need to erase himself entirely, now nothing more than a construct in a rich girl’s mind who will use this experience of “slumming it” to rise to even higher success, going on to sell out and direct music videos back when that was still lucrative. And yes, because The Souvenir Part II is autobiographical, Hogg incorporates this element of her own career trajectory into the movie. Even though she was doing work of a much more “indie” nature than Julie appears to be, thanks in part to Hogg’s tutelage under Derek Jarman.
In any event, whether in film or life, that’s how it has always worked: those who come from well-to-do circumstances (as a result of their ancestors exploiting the working class) are given a better launching point with which to become even more well-to-do on the backs of the working class. Whether that’s what Anthony truly was, we’ll never fully know based on what The Souvenir and its sequel tell us. The story has become solely for Julie (and her cushioned perspective) to tell.
“What did you feel when Anthony died?” Julie asks Rosalind at one point. She answers, “I was very concerned for you.” This moment makes it crystal-clear that Anthony is nothing but a “secondary character” in and “material” for Julie’s life. By the end, even Julie can freely admit that Anthony is now little more than someone of perhaps “mythic value” to her as she remarks, “I’m struggling to recognize whether I’m missing Anthony as the person he was or whether I’m missing that intimacy…”
And, in this sense, The Souvenir Part II is less about “the translation of the vision to the medium” and more about how stories are only ever “allowed” to be told by those with the money to do it. Once again emphasizing that art, like everything else, is a privilege of the affluent. Most especially on the class-oriented island of Britain.
