- The Guardian Sat urday 31 Aug ust 2019
60The week
in culture
Joanna Hogg’s new movie is her
most intensely personal yet – but
this mysterious and beautiful fi lm is
not revelatory in any obvious way.
It has perplexed and baffl ed and
bemused and entranced fi ercely.
Yet its diffi culties feel not like fl aws
but rather sunspots of inspiration.
The mother-daughter relationship
is quietly superb and the musical
interludes are wonderful: there is a
glorious outing for Robert Wyatt’s
haunting Shipbuilding and Willie
Mabon’s Poison Ivy.
The Souvenir has already received
plaudits as a breakthrough for this
director – although I don’t think she
needed a “breakthough” given the
quality of her three previous fi lms.
A rather lovely poster image of its
two leads might lead audiences to
expect something romantic and
comfortingly mainstream. Wrong.
The Souvenir is an artefact in the
highest auteur register. Its absence
of tonal readability is a challenge.
But there is also a cerebrally fi erce,
slow-burn passion in its austere,
unemphasised plainness.
Hogg conducts her dramatic
business in a sort of indoor available
light, with characters often receding
into semi-darkness if they walk away
from windows. It is a fi lm about
the upper classes, but not in the
Downton Abbey style: it is about the
upper classes in the dull day-to-day,
a social -realist movie about posh
people. It’s as if Hogg has found a
contemporary English response to
the rhetoric of Antonioni or Visconti.
The setting is the early 80s, and
a sweet-natured fi lm student called
Julie lives in a smart fl at in London’s
Knightsbridge, just across from the
cupola of Harrods department store.
This is evidently a pied-à-terre kept
by her extremely well-off parents.
Her mother sometimes pops in after
shopping expeditions, and is always
having to “lend” Julie money for her
fi lm projects, yet Julie is charmingly
open about her advantages in life.
Then the vampiri c fi gure of
Anthony makes his appearance
in Julie’s life. He is a supercilious,
opinionated young man with a
job in the Foreign Offi ce and an
insidious knack of playing on Julie’s
insecurities by asking pointedly
sceptical, quizzical questions about
her work and airily claiming to
admire Powell and Pressburger. His
seduction technique involves taking
her to the Wallace Collection to see
Fragonard’s painting The Souvenir.
It isn’t long before this sinister
fi gure has moved in, buying Julie
erotic lingerie, taking her to Venice,
disrupting her fi lm-making plans
and upending her life.
In another movie, this would
make for black comedy. But comedy
isn’t what’s happening. So what is?
Something far subtler and more
incremental.
Anthony is played with
under stated arrogance by Tom
Burke , and newcomer Honor
Swinton Byrne gives a graceful and
insouciant performance as Julie. She
is the daughter of Tilda Swinton,
who duly plays Julie’s mother,unobtrusively aged up as a patrician
mamma. At fi rst I wondered if there
was meta-textual humour in this
casting but it is simply that their
on-screen rapport is tremendous.
Hogg creates an almost trance-
like state with the fi lm, which she
shakes off when Anthony and Julie
host a dinner party attended by
Anthony’s insuff erable fi lm-maker
friend (a hilarious Richard Ayoade )
who brayingly announces that it
is appalling how Britain, the home
of the Stones, the Kinks and the
Small Faces, still doesn’t do movie
musicals. (He doesn’t mention
the Who, so is maybe not a fan of
Tommy .) It is this character who is
to reveal the poison cloud gathering
over the head of poor innocent Julie.
The Souvenir is at least partly
autobiographical on Hogg’s part
and her fi lm sometimes feels as if
it is circling around and around a
memory that is too painful to be
approached directly , an episode
which arguably endangered her
development as an artist and in
another way stimulated it. And
there is something so coolly elegant
in this circling – a choreography of
young love, and a talent preparing
to take fl ight.
Peter BradshawWhat others said
“It is a viscerally feminist movie, one
that, despite being set in the early
1980s, is the most unerringly Time’s
Up-infl uenced fi lm of recent years.”
Kevin Maher The Times“Hogg ’s visual memoir is a romance,
a trauma, a family drama, a
coming-of-age spectacle –
a delicate but dark creature.”
Hannah Woodhead Little White Lies▲ Slow-burn brilliance ... Honor
Swinton Byrne and Tom Burke
PHOTOGRAPH: ALLSTAR COLLECTION/BBC FILMSFilm
The Souvenir
★★★★★
Haunting tale
of young
love baffl es
and beguiles
Six years after its debut on the
Edinburgh fringe Phoebe Waller-
Bridge’s one-woman play fi nally
gets its West End premiere. In
the interim it has travelled the
globe, spawned a TV series and
garnered shelves of awards.
Seeing it on stage for the fi rst time,
I was struck by its subversive
method, its inherent sadness and
by Waller-Bridge’s mimetic skill as
a performer.
Everyone by now has a shrewd
idea of who Fleabag is : a woman
in constant crisis whose guinea-
pig-themed cafe is going bust and
who has the capacity to screw up
her sex life, alienate family and
destroy friendships. Yet, although
her story is familiar, and the fi rst-
night playing to a celebrity-packed
audience felt like a coronation,
Waller-Bridge still has the ability to
spring surprises.
At one point she recounts how
Fleabag, after seeing a drunk
girl home, decides to have a
nightcap. When she tells us that
“a sweaty bald man cups my
vagina from behind at the bar,”
the audience gasps in suitable
horror. Yet Waller-Bridge instantly
pulls the rug from under us by
smiling sweetly as she adds:
“But he buys me a drink so –
he’s nice actually.”
It is that ability to catch the
contradictions in Fleabag’s
character that is, I suspect, the
source of the show’s success.
Waller-Bridge says aloud the things
that are normally kept hidden
and has created a woman who is
both caustic about men and avidfor sex. But although the show is
often funny, I laughed less than
I expected. Ultimately, it is less
stand up comedy than sit-down
tragedy in that it is a study in
female desperation.
Fleabag craves human
contact but her quick tongue and
awareness of the absurdity of
every situation repel those she
would attract.
Waller-Bridge the performer,
however, is indivisible from
the writer. If I preferred the
stage version to the Fleabag of
TV, it is because Waller-Bridge
is able to populate the stage
with the characters of her
imagination.
When on the tube she meets a
rodent-faced guy who tells a story
“like he doesn’t want to let the
words out”, she screws up her face
so that his tiny mouth becomes a
minuscule orifi ce.
Equally when she recalls how
her cafe-partner, Boo, took music
seriously Waller-Bridge’s head
does little rhythmical jerks evoking
the monastic absorption of those
enslaved to a beat.
While she can summon up a
character at will, Waller-Bridge
also makes expressive use of her
body while barely moving from a
stool: at one point she contorts her
shape to show how she obliged an
ex-boyfriend by taking intimate
snapshots of her vagina.
Vicky Jones ’s production and
Isobel Waller-Bridge’s sound design
enhance the performance by their
essential simplicity and, although
the show has been over hyped, it
is still quirky and original. It off ers
a remarkable portrait of a modern
woman who shamelessly bares her
soul and in so doing reveals her
essential solitude.
Michael BillingtonWhat others said
“Waller-Bridge makes it feel intimate
and conspiratorial, drawing you
in with those judgmental eyebrow
swoops and wicked grin.”
Holly Williams Independent“An absolutely deserved victory lap
for a show that delights in probing
the wet, fl eshy terrain between sexual
empowerment and abasement.”
Natasha Tripney The StageTheatre
Fleabag
★★★★☆Magnifi cent
Wa l ler-Br idge
fi nds hilarity
in tragedy
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