Cinema
Gilded cage
Deborah Ross
The Souvenir
15, Key cities
Joanna Hogg’s films are the antithesis of
popcorn entertainment so if it’s not the
antithesis of popcorn entertainment that
you seek, you may be better off going else-
where. Her latest, The Souvenir, is about a
young woman finding herself and her own
voice, and is semi-improvised and I know
someone who hates her films — ‘like watch-
ing paint dry,’ I was told — but if this is so, I
have never seen paint dry so enthrallingly. I
was fascinated throughout, in fact.
This is her fourth film after Unrelated
(2007), Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition
(2013), and it is her best, I think. (Although
I will always have a very soft spot for Unre-
lated.) All of her films are somehow about
people trapped by their own privilege — I
am wondering if it’s worth thinking of her
as the Ken Loach of posh people — and
The Souvenir is no exception. Howev-
er, this time out it is an autobiographical
drama, based on a particular relationship
she had with a particular man in her early
twenties while still a film student. Set in
London in the 1980s, Honor Swinton Byrne
plays Hogg’s younger self, now called Julie.Julie lives in the Knightsbridge flat owned
by her rich parents who are otherwise at
their country pile in Norfolk. Her mother
(played by Tilda Swinton, Swinton Byrne’s
actual mother) sometimes visits and fusses
about lamps. Julie knows she lives ‘in a bub-
ble’ and is therefore planning on making a
film about poverty in Sunderland. Julie is
sincere and eager but still wears little car-
digans as offset by brooches so may not
be ready for poverty in Sunderland. ThisAnthony exploits her; he steals from
her; he tortures her: but her world is
too hermetically sealed to leave himis Hogg asking: for an artist, what experi-
ences are valid?
Now on to Anthony. Oh my God,
Anthony. She meets Anthony (Tom Burke)
at a party she holds at the flat. He wears
pin-stripe suits and bow ties and may work
at the Foreign Office. (He says he does but
we’re never sure.) He is a decade older and
a man of the world and he takes her to the
Wallace Collection to see ‘The Souvenir’ by
Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Hogg has said she
doesn’t know why he took her to see that
painting, just that he did, and it lingered,
just as it lingers for us now, and will always
linger for us now. (Thanks for that, Joanna.)
Anthony moves in with Julie and Antho-
ny wears an apron and cooks but Anthony
is not all he seems as he has a raging heroin
habit. He exploits Julie. He steals from her.
He tortures her. Leave him, you wish to say
to her, but on the other hand you under-
stand why she doesn’t. Her world is too her-
metically sealed otherwise. And she values
his critical sensibility, even if she allows
herself to be intimidated by it. ‘You have
to make a connection between your expe-Sensational: Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie and Tom Burke as Anthony