The Souvenir: Part II (2021)

I see reviews of director and screenwriter Joanna Hogg's epic two-part The Souvenir (the first came out in 2019) reach for heady comparisons with filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu and Eric Rohmer, both of which make sense. For the nearly four hours of The Souvenir it's arguable that nothing or very little happens, but step back and you see better how much it is charged with grief and grief's strange ways. It's autobiographical, with Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) standing in for Hogg as a young woman in the '80s attending film school. Julie's mother Rosalind is played by Tilda Swinton, who is Byrne's mother in real life, and Swinton also knew Hogg at the time and was featured in the 28-minute movie, Caprice, that Hogg made for her graduating project at film school. The Souvenir is thus very much a family affair, and feels it—warm, intimate, prickly, and always interesting. The Souvenir, both parts, went by quickly for me as I found it easy to sink into the rhythms of Julie's life, her involvement with a man addicted to heroin, her understanding or lack of understanding of his addiction—she seems mostly unaware of it—and her attempt to find a catharsis or something like it in her work. The elements of Ozu and Rohmer are readily apparent, also Orson Welles, Jean Cocteau, and other giants a film student would encounter and attempt to absorb, as the picture sweeps from scene to scene with confidence and quiet and evocative moments. The first part essentially covers the romance and this second part the making of her student film (here called The Souvenir, of course). Among other things, The Souvenir: Part II is one of the better movies about making a movie, hitting on financing difficulties and all the on-set troubles of a million decisions to make at once and much of the cast and crew second-guessing her, bewildered by the way the story seems to be going. I loved everything about both of these movies until we arrive, late in this picture, at a screening of the movie she made, which seemed painfully pretentious to me and packed with art picture cliches. Did Hogg intend to make it look that way? Is that how it looked to her coming back to Caprice over 30 years later? Or did it affect me that way because I was unfamiliar with Caprice? It was the most jarring part of the whole experience—looking up Caprice on the internet later, it did seem dotty with film influence but much better than my experience of The Souvenir version. Worth a look—both parts, and Caprice too.