Movies about moviemaking are rarely as interesting as their makers think, but Julie’s process does illuminate the character and Hogg’s autobiographical intentions. Embracing a rigorous fidelity to her past, she builds an exact replica of her flat and dresses the male lead in Anthony’s housecoat. Julie’s uncertainty, her doubts and mistakes are crucial to “Souvenir Part II,” but Swinton Byrne’s wan performance is an uninteresting placeholder for an idea.Įventually and with much stumbling, Julie’s grad film comes into focus she begins shooting it, basing it on her relationship with Anthony. But she isn’t skilled enough to create a persuasive inner life for Julie, and because Hogg avoids scripted exposition, her actress can’t lean on the dialogue to help fill in the blanks.
Swinton Byrne presents a likable, sympathetic figure (you’re certainly drawn to the character), and has a jutting, sculptural face that demands your attention. “Part II” misses him, too - specifically it misses Burke’s charisma and talent, which worked with Swinton Byrne’s awkward hesitancy in the first film, creating a friction that suited the dynamics of their characters’ relationship.
Most filmmakers smooth out scenes so they seamlessly flow into a whole Hogg likes to cut off songs, as if snapping off a radio, and abruptly shift from here to there - just as we do in life. She’s found her own way at the crossroads of art cinema and the mainstream, and particularly striking is how she handles time and transitions. But it is Hogg’s filmmaking - her narrative and stylistic choices, the precision of her framing, the stillness of her images and how she withholds information - that distinguishes “Souvenir” and her other movies. That first story has its obvious attractions, notably the irresistible appeal of tragic love, with its messy beds and broken hearts.
Set in Britain in the early 1980s, the first movie finds Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) in film school, generously supported by her parents. “Part II” picks up more or less where Hogg’s 2019 art-house favorite “ The Souvenir” ends. This, by contrast, is the story of a recognizably faltering young woman who tells her disapproving male professors that her film will be about “life as I imagine it” - and then makes good on her statement of intent. And while it is familiar in many ways, it also isn’t the usual bleating about art and artists partly because most such stories are about men, those tortured, mad geniuses whose work dominates culture, filling museums and biopics.
It’s about life and art, inspiration and process, growing and becoming. The latest from the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg, “Souvenir Part II” is a portrait of a young artist. As she walks among her mirrored reflections, she also seems to be passing her many different selves - the dutiful daughter, the drifting student, the bereft survivor - now all in service to her role as an artist. After struggling with her grief and her art, she seems on the cusp of a creative breakthrough: She’s made her graduate movie and her mother, father and friends are there to see it. It is a freighted moment for the character, a film student whose lover died not long ago. Deep into “The Souvenir Part II,” a young woman walks through a hall of mirrors as if in a dream.