In 2019, A24 released The Souvenir, British filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical tale about a young, upper class woman involved with an older man. Their relationship is at times tender, and often fraught. The young woman, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), is also a film student, and allows herself to constantly be criticized by her boyfriend, Anthony (Tom Burke)—who says he works for the foreign service—and even taken advantage of financially.
Hogg’s follow-up, The Souvenir Part II, now in theaters, begins not long after Anthony dies from an overdose. As Julie grapples with his death, she begins to metaphorically sober up—attending school more often and once again interacting with her peers. She also has to face their evaluations of her as both a director and a person when she takes on the project of her very intimate graduate film. It’s a complex two-part narrative that deserves attention and deeper dissection, now that Hogg’s entire vision of Julie’s story is complete.
Below, Vanity Fair staff writers Yohana Desta and Cassie da Costa discuss the Part II’s themes, resonances, and performances—as well as Hogg’s sometimes surprising approach to putting the second part of this story onscreen.
Yohana Desta: If Joanna Hogg had only made the first installment of The Souvenir, that would have been lovely enough. It’s a beautiful story, an elegant and carefully crafted film trembling with heart. But The Souvenir Part II—a continuation of the story, though Hogg has been averse to labeling it a sequel—is, to me, the more winning of the diptych. I feel this way for a few reasons—but first, what did you think overall?
Cassie da Costa: To me, Part II is a more rigorous extension of the first, in that we see Julie forced to finally collaborate with her classmates in a bid to make her graduation film. In The Souvenir, she’s so consumed by her exciting, yet dark and tumultuous relationship with the older Anthony; —we barely see her show up at school or interact with people her age. This time, her peers push her to examinelook at her time with Anthony, which she depicts in her student film, without the same self-serving naivete. In turn, this emerging clarity in the film’s ideas pushes Hogg to take more formal risks and to ask herself why she’s doing what she’s doing as a filmmaker. In this way, it’s her 8 ½ .
Desta: I think that’s precisely what feels so electric about the second film, though I am admittedly a sucker for movies about movies. Hogg’s film school memories are so deliciously detailed, and she’s unafraid ofto painting Julie in an unflattering light as the charactershe figures out how to become a director. I both loved and loathed watching her clash with her classmates; loved because it was so naturalistic and rich with tension, loathed because Hogg’s portrait of grad school is rendered with painful accuracy. That roundtable of doubting professors casually eviscerating Julie’s work was one of the most bone-chilling things I’ve seen all year.
da Costa: It really was! The serious old professors telling her she ought to go along with her original plan to make a dour, realistic, working- class film entirely outside of her experience and, it seemed, knowledge.
One area I know you and I feel different, though, aboutdiffer in opinion on is in Hogg’s choice to move awaydeparture from the well-lit naturalism of apartments and corridors and into theatrical abstraction, replaying Julie’s experiences as a kind of nightmarish but also dreamlike passage. That moment(it reminded mey of the overflowing stylistic approach of film and opera director Werner Schroeter, or even of the famous filmmaker Schroeter inspired, Rainer Werner Fassbinder).
This is the first time in the film we see (the ghost of) Anthony. I; in one scene, Julie she dons an elaborate mask bearing his likeness while walking slowly through a mirrored room. This passage, near the end of the film, brings to life Julie’s defiant statement to her professors during that roundtable—where she essentially says,: To heavily paraphrase, “I don’t want to make films that are exactly like life.; I want to make the things I imagined in my head.” Hogg’s films, in general, can be deeply naturalistic, rooted into what feels like “real,” accessible imagery. But in Part II, she’s momentarily pulled to abandons that simplicity and goes for something more visually disruptive and imaginative. I–it moved me!
Desta: In the spirit of film school feedback, I won’t say I disliked this sequence. I’ll just say I disengaged from it. It’s beautifully made and unpredictable, a fun change of pace from the rest of the film. But everything else was perfection to me—the careful framing, the dark contrasts, the naturalistic dialogue. That’s where I wanted to stay.
That said, I did appreciate other moments that felt like a break in tone, a sly step into another kind of movie. That bloody love scene with Charlie Heaton, for example. (Is thisthat the brooding role Robert Pattinson would have taken on had he not dropped out of the movie?? RIP.) Also: every scene with Richard Ayoade, in the vicious role he was born to play. If the Souvenir cinematic universe rides again, I want to be taken to his planet.
da Costa: I’m also sad that we didn’t get Robert Pattinson in this movie! My thought was he might have worked well in Joe Alwyn’s part,; though I have to say Alwyn was a lovely diversion for a moment there. His scenes made me excited for the first time to see him play Nick Conway in the upcoming adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends.
And Ayoade, of course, is as incredible here as he was in the first film—the crown character actor in a film full of character actors. His petulant, moody, outright rude, and always hilarious Patrick is an unapologetically excessive filmmaker who has perhaps the most withering (and lucid) takes on cinema you’ll get outside of certain misanthropic corners of Ffilm Twitter. Ayoade is also a director and writer in real life—he made the coming-of-age film Submarine as well as The Double, a Dostoevsky adaptation starring Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowksa. His perfection here makes me sad we don’t see him act in more films. Hopefully Hogg continues to work with him, and some other auteurs are inspired to get in line as well.
What did you think of Swinton Byrne’s performance? She has a tough job in many ways, playing such a reserved, shaky person yet having to hold the film together as the lead. Part II is only her third film, and The Souvenir was her first significant role.
Desta: The more I think about Swinton Byrne’s performance, the more impressed I am. She’s essentially making a biopic in front of the person she’s portraying—and that person is in charge of telling her how to do it and how well she’s doing it. That, coupled with the fact that Hogg doesn’t write traditional screenplays—, but instead writes free-flowing documents full of ideas and inspiration, calling upon her actors to feel their way through the scenes in order to devise the dialogue—, renders her workit all the more adroit in retrospect.
Perhaps it helps that Julie is such a restrained, level character, whose transformation happens at a quieter, much more internal clip. But the overall effect is winning, especially in theall those ultra cozy scenes with her real-life mother, Tilda Swinton, who plays Julie’s mother. Of course, it probably also helps that Swinton Byrne’s background is similar to Hogg’s, and that she comes from a somewhat similar, affluent background to Hogg, which she can feed directly into the role. She also had a direct line to Hogg through her mother: Tilda starred in one of the filmmaker’s early shorts, Caprice, in 1986, playing a girl who gets trapped in a fashion magazine. In this episode of Nepotism Court, I can’t help but rule that Swinton Byrne is good, actually.
da Costa: Ha! I agree. Swinton Byrne embodies the kind of nepotism I approve of, which is to say her casting fits and she delivers.
And I’m glad you brought up the intertwined relationships in the cast and crew. There’s also a Russian doll aspect of this film, in which we see Julie directing her friend Garance (Attenberg’s Ariane Labed) as Garance plays a version of Julie, just as Swinton Byrne is playing a version of Hogg. The film’s final scene, which I won’t give away, brings home this idea of nested realities (or surrealities) in filmmaking.
When women make personal films, there’s always a lot of emphasis in the press on the idea of autobiography; in books, too, the memoir is, at this point, a feminine form. But the self-portrait in painting or photography still has a masculine implication. Perhaps it has to do with an idea of time—societally, male identities are often thought of as fixed while women’s are changeable, mercurial. In The Souvenir, Julie is so fixated on Anthony—he’s her great subject, and she has a hard time seeing or at least acknowledging his shifting nature. But in Part II, we start to see her form an image of herself and bring it to screen, as Hogg is doing in making the film.
Julie, and Hogg, alternate between autobiography and portraiture—am I capturing myself in transition, or in a moment in time? The richness of this film is in its increasing ambiguity about how time passes for Julie: Is she coming or going; is she right here or over there? Her anxieties about Anthony are in many ways recast as her more liberating ways for her to think about herself.
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