The Souvenir is a film about a young woman who doesn’t understand what is happening to her. To make it, Joanna Hogg cast a young woman who didn’t understand what was happening to her. The film cannot decide whether these are the same thing.
Every actor in The Souvenir was given a script. Tom Burke, playing Anthony, received old letters and voice recordings from the real man. Tilda Swinton, who was present in Joanna Hogg’s actual life during the actual relationship and watched it happen, had the full script and the full knowledge of where it was headed.
Honor Swinton Byrne, playing Julie — playing Joanna Hogg at twenty-one — was given Hogg’s diaries from the early 1980s, photographs, old films, notes. She was told to improvise every scene. She was not told where the story was going. The revelation that Anthony is a heroin addict came to her on set, in the scene, through the other actors, the way it would have come to Julie in life.
Guy Lodge of Variety called this “a work of memoir shattered and reassembled into a universally moving, truthful fiction.” He was right about the shattering. He was right about the truth. What he could not say — what the film’s extraordinary honesty about Julie’s self-deception cannot say about itself — is that Hogg manufactured the incomprehension she was trying to recreate. She stood behind the camera, forty years wiser, watching a nineteen-year-old receive in real time the shock that she herself had not managed to see coming in real time. She directed authenticity of not-knowing by producing it in another person. The film is about what it means not to see clearly. The way the film was made enacts exactly what it is about, and neither the film nor any review of it has yet looked at this squarely.
The Souvenir, written and directed by Hogg and released in 2019, is her fourth feature, based directly on her experience as a film student in 1980s London. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a quietly ambitious young woman making a film about working-class life in Sunderland — a world entirely unlike her own Knightsbridge existence, which is the film’s first gentle irony about artists and the subjects they claim. She meets Anthony (Tom Burke), a man who works for the Foreign Office in a capacity he cannot discuss, who is erudite and controlling and eventually revealed to be a heroin addict. Julie stays. She lends him money. She is gaslighted when her jewellery goes missing. She takes him back. She adapts herself to the contours of a relationship she cannot fully read until, at the film’s end, she begins — slowly, without announcement — to move through it toward her own door.
The flat where they live is a meticulous reconstruction of Hogg’s actual flat. The skyline visible through the windows is back-projected from Hogg’s own 1980s photographs. Her real gold-framed bed is in the shot. The film is one of the most precisely autobiographical works in British cinema and announces itself as such, which is both its great formal achievement and the surface under which its most interesting argument is hidden.
| Director | Joanna Hogg |
|---|---|
| Year | 2019 |
| Runtime | 119 minutes |
| Cast | Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton |
| Awards | World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, Sundance 2019; eight BIFA nominations |
| Streaming | MUBI, Criterion Channel |
When Tilda Swinton was asked in an NPR interview whether she had ever said anything to Hogg during the real relationship — had she seen the signs, had she warned her — Swinton said: “No, I didn’t. I didn’t. I think that Joanna and I similarly didn’t see that there was bad news written on him at all.” This is the most important sentence spoken about The Souvenir by anyone. It confirms that the woman in the film’s story genuinely did not see, and that this failure of vision was shared by her closest friend who watched it happen alongside her. The blindness was real. The film is honest about it.
It is also the sentence that makes the production decision so charged. Hogg spent forty years understanding what she had not seen. She wrote the script. She cast the actors. She stood behind the camera. And she chose not to tell Honor where the story was going — so that Honor’s incomprehension would be real, unperformed, the authentic texture of not-knowing from the inside.
“Hogg reconstructed her own naivety by producing genuine naivety in someone else. The film is about a young woman who cannot see clearly. The method by which the film was made reproduced that condition in a nineteen-year-old who had never acted before. Whether this is formal genius or something that requires a harder look is the question the film’s beauty prevents anyone from asking.”
There is a painting at the heart of the film: Fragonard’s The Souvenir, 1778, a young woman in a pink dress carving her lover’s initials into a tree. In the gallery scene, Julie says the woman looks sad. Anthony says she looks determined. Hogg has confirmed that Anthony “puts her in the picture literally” — that the real man in her real life wanted her to see herself as the woman in the painting, devoted and certain and etching herself into his story. What neither Julie nor the young Hogg could see at the time was that the painting’s woman is carving someone else’s name. The tree will hold that name long after she is gone from the scene. The initials belong to him.
The film shows us this image and trusts us to read it. The film was made by a woman who lived it and now reads it perfectly. The film’s leading actress was not told what it meant until she arrived at the scenes where meaning arrived in the original story. This is the formal structure the film cannot examine: Hogg saw the painting clearly in 1978 when she was taken to the gallery; she could not read it clearly until years later. Honor saw the painting the way Julie saw it — innocently, just a painting, just a scene between two young people interpreting art. The gap between those two kinds of seeing is the film’s entire subject. The method of making the film reproduced that gap in the space between director and lead actress.
The film in this sequence that most precisely mirrors this structure is Aftersun, reviewed in the previous post, where Charlotte Wells added to the holiday footage everything that adult Sophie now knows, so that the film’s formal editing embodies knowledge the protagonist did not have at the time. Both films are reconstructions from adult understanding. The difference is decisive: Wells added her retrospective knowledge to the footage, making the editing the site of the grief. Hogg subtracted her retrospective knowledge from the lead actress, making Honor’s actual performance the site of the innocence. Wells’s grief is in the cutting room. Hogg’s clarity is in the director’s chair. In both cases, the act of making the film is the thing the film cannot see about itself.
The film The Souvenir is, like the painting it takes its name from, a beautiful object that asks to be read from different distances. From close up, it is Julie’s story: precise, painful, generous to its protagonist’s capacity for self-deception without being contemptuous of it. From far back, it is Hogg’s story: the forty-year distance between not-seeing and seeing, collapsed into a film made partly by manufacturing the not-seeing in someone else. The woman in the painting is carving something into the tree. The question neither she nor the film can ask is whose initials they actually are.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022): reviewed in the previous post and The Souvenir‘s closest formal companion — both films are reconstructions from adult knowledge that the protagonist lacked at the time, but where Wells added her knowledge to the editing, Hogg subtracted hers from the lead actress. The comparison maps the two possible positions a filmmaker can take when looking back at something she could not see clearly while it was happening.
The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg, 2021): the sequel in which Julie makes a film about Anthony, and Hogg makes a film about making The Souvenir, and the layers of reconstruction become the subject rather than the structure. Essential viewing alongside Part I, and the film that forces the question the first film avoids: what happens to an artist when she has to explain what her own work means to the actors performing it?
UnspokenCinema publishes every week. No ratings. No rankings. Just what films reveal without meaning to.