The Souvenir

When I was young, more than 40 years ago, the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder were gradually making their way to the United States and the campus of the University of Minnesota where I was studying.  I didn't like Fassbinder's films then -- they were staged in a style that was alien to me, the characters were off-putting, and the movies seemed tedious.  But I appreciated that there was some quality about these films that urged me to grit my teeth and see them -- and many sequences from those movies have remained with me all my life.  In the last twenty years, I have developed an appreciation for the "music" as it were in those movies and, now, not only admire but enjoy them.  Joanna Hogg's films have a similar effect on me -- I find them off-putting, weirdly rigorous in ways that are boring, full of coy inside jokes and allusions, and privileged to the point of being nauseating.  But I can also perceive that the movies are brilliant and, I hope, that it will not take me another 25 years to warm to them -- I don't have 25 years left.

The Souvenir (2019) is Hogg's most recent film and, when properly understood, it is a work of genius.  The movie interposes certain obstacles to being grasped adequately -- the lead character is a fantastically rich young woman with the unsettling ambitions of an attractive girl who has never been told that she can't have something, including, in this case, a spectacular Knightsbridge flat and a career as a "feature film" maker (she's all of twenty when she announces her desire to make "feature films).  Initially, the characters aren't appealing and, although they are distinctly upper-crust, they speak with largely impenetrable accents.  The film mostly elides all explanatory, narrative material and presents the story as a series of disconnected tableaux.  Tilda Swinton, who is an acquired  taste herself, is important in the film.  Furthermore, the movie is ambiguous as to whether the heroine's complicity in the heroin addiction of her boyfriend is intentional or merely naive.  (The casting is rather inexact also -- the heroine's lover is supposed to be much older than her, but Tom Burke, who plays the man, doesn't really seem materially older than Honor Swinton Byrne who has the role of the protagonist.  Certainly, no one in the film treats the swain as significantly older than the heroine.)  The movie is subtle in all respects and, probably, has to be seen once with the commentary turned-on.  You can't fully appreciate the picture unless you are British and with a certain social prestige or have the commentary to explain details that might otherwise be obscure.

Simply stated, the film's plot is negligible.  A young woman from an exceedingly wealthy family meets a rather mysterious older man at a party.  He courts her by sending extravagantly worded letters in the nihilistic, rather self-pitying style of Lord Byron.  The young woman falls into a love affair with him.  Gradually, she learns that the man, who says he's in the Foreign Service, is a heroin addict.  The young woman, who wants to make "feature films" in the austere style of the Italian neo-realists (black and white and with working class subjects) can't write the script -- needless to say, she knows nothing about her purported subject.  She attends film school, learns some things, and works on several student pictures.  The girl, Julie, travels to Venice with Anthony, her older lover.  He has somewhat exotic sexual tastes (he dresses her up in French underwear with an elaborate system of garters), listens to Bartok obsessively, and swans around their apartment wearing a frock coat that looks like something Goethe's Werther might affect.  Anthony attends rehab but can't kick the habit.  Julie throws him out of the apartment.  She has a love affair with another young man.  Anthony returns to her life only to overdose and die. Julie completes her film called "The Rehearsal" and, in the final scene, leaves the studio, an enormous and abandoned airport hangar, through a huge door that opens onto a lush, green landscape that we have seen several times before but never understood where it was located.  The sense is that she is both freed from her oppressive relationship with Anthony but that the landscape, shown while she reads aloud his letters, will always remain with her -- Anthony, like Auden's Freud, is less an influence than a climate and an entire world.  "The Souvenir" refers to a tiny painting by Fragonard in the Wallace Collection in London, an image that Anthony has sent to the heroine by post card, and that re-occurs in the film.  The picture ends with the promise that "The Souvenir Part II" will be forthcoming.   The film is obviously autobiographical in a very exact way.  The action takes place in the early 80's to the counterpoint of IRA bombings -- including the famous 1983 bombing of Harrod's in Knightsbridge. 

Hogg shoots the film in a bewildering mixture of formats -- there are still photographs showing the blue collar subject of the proposed "feature film", 8 mm footage that Hogg actually made at the time of the events shown in the movie, 16 mm color and black-and-white footage, 35 mm, and digital as well.  The story is developed obliquely, by hints and rumors.  Hogg is a great maker of images -- there are many astonishingly beautiful tableaux.  The audience must be patient and wait for the meaning of images to be revealed -- there is a striking image of Venice reflected in a canal (it looks like Monet) that isn't ever explained as a part of the plot but that prefigures the couple's trip to Venice and several swooning shots of a garment with an immense train that Julie wears when they attend the opera.  A remarkable image of a landscape with four clumps of trees under  a sky that occupies 9/10ths of the frame is not "placed" until the film's beautiful last image.  This image suggests Anthony's specious allure and is shown when the heroine reads in voice-over from her lover's letters.  Hogg very rarely moves the camera but when she does the effect is overwhelming and palpable -- in the penultimate scene, we see the heroine gravely directing her student film "The Rehearsal" in which an actress reads a funereal poem by Christina Rosetti:  the heroine's camera dollies in toward the actress on-screen while Hogg's camera slowly dollies forward toward Julie.  Julie, who is exquisitely lit, turns to the camera and impassively regards Hogg's lens.  The effect is hard to exactly describe, but, in context. the two aligned camera-movements, the dark room, the faces illumined against the darkness all create an overwhelming sense of grief, of mourning, and the images are like an elegy.  Tiny details are significant.  In an early scene, we see Anthony scribbling on a bill for an expensive lunch in a luxury hotel -- as he signs, the camera shows his hand and the bill in close-up.  We wonder why this detail is emphasized but, later, we are shown a similar scene in which Julie is signing a bill in an ultra-expensive restaurant - the point is that Julie is now hemorrhaging funds to the profligate and penniless heroin addict, Anthony.  The roles have become reversed.

Several thematic nodes are developed.  Julie is forever cadging money from her parents to make her films.  Anthony just assumes that he has the right to Julie's money and we see him borrowing cash from her, presumably to buy smack.  Directing movies is apparently a little like caring for a drug addict -- lots of cash is required as well as great attention to detail, endless patience, and, even, solicitude.  IRA bombings are also linked to Anthony's drug habit -- this creates a sense of impending doom that haunts the film.  Anthony is unpredictable -- so is the IRA. 

My initial response to the film was simplistic and wrongheaded -- but this response arises from a misunderstanding, or better put, ambiguity that is central to the movie.  Anthony is a pig.  He's unkind and condescending to Julie from the outset, sexually exploitative, and demanding -- Anthony is infinitely needy and Julie gives and gives to him without much in the way of recompense.  Although Anthony may have some kind of sly appeal to wealthy London debutantes (actually Hogg was from Tunsbridge Wells, a conservative suburb -- her father was as wealthy insurance executive), his appeal goes missing to American audiences.  The guy seems to be a malicious twit, pretentious and physically unattractive.  Burke has a scarred upper lip, a pugnacious jaw, and the features of bullfrog -- he's not anyone's idea of an appealing leading man and, to his credit, the actor makes no attempt to be even remotely likeable.  He's a pathetic bully when he's not whining for Julie's attention.  In one scene, in which he loots her apartment to find money for a fix (he makes it look like a home invasion), Burke looks bloated, half-dead.  Julie seems to not understand that the man is a heroin addict despite various traces and clues -- at one point, she even kisses needle-tracks on his arm without exactly knowing what the bruises mean.  The viewer comes to the immediate conclusion that Julie is too dumb to live -- her naivety is annoying; how is it that this intelligent young woman doesn't grasp that Anthony is a vicious addict who will do anything for a fix and who's entire modus operandi is to intimidate her into doing what he wants?  Either the film is a study in egregious stupidity or an account of obsessive amour fou.  In fact, on second viewing, the film emerges as the latter.  Julie probably knows that Anthony is a junkie at an early stage in the narrative (although this is never made clear); she's beautiful and talented and it's obvious that Anthony is abusive and, in fact, maliciously destroying her life.  (In the commentary, Joanna Hogg notes that she didn't really make friends in film school and ended up losing five years of her life to this destructive real-life relationship.)  Julie is too good for Anthony but she is somehow emotionally dependent upon him. The film is about something inexplicable -- a relationship founded upon obsession.  We see Julie attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting -- of course, Anthony would never bother to attend such a group.  Whatever it is about Julie that will be nurtured into great art (and this when she is on the border of Old Age -- The Souvenir was made when Hogg was 62) is somehow implicit in her self-destructive relationship with Anthony.  And, in the sex scenes, understated but still powerful, we grasp that Hogg's intimate connection with Anthony has never been fully resolved -- she is still carrying a torch for him 35 years later.  I watched the film the wrong way on first viewing:  I intuitively disliked Julie for her privilege and pretentiousness and I thought the film was somehow satiric -- this young woman is too stupid to understand, despite all the evidence, that her boyfriend is a doomed junkie.  On second viewing, I came to grasp that the relationship is an example of "mad love" -- it's obsessive and doomed and flies in the face of reason and no one can understand it unless they are participants in this dance of death.