Hogg’s double-Swinton, highly autobiographical study of a young film-maker is less detached, more emotionally engaging, as we enter Julie’s world for a second time
It shouldn’t work, and maybe it shouldn’t even have got made. But it does and it has: and Joanna Hogg has given us an amazingly luminous self-portrait of the film-maker as a young woman: metatextual, confessional and autobiographical. And in two parts, what’s more, demanding our attention and getting it (the first part came out in 2019). The Souvenir is a movie that has defied the laws of film industry gravity, and those big names in the credits don’t in themselves explain this: a film that has floated free of what might be expected commercially or in any other way and carries itself with a marvellous austere artistry and compositional flair. And the sunbursts of emotion in the musical soundtrack gave me enough vitamin D to last the rest of the year.
In this second part, I found the things that were a challenge the first time around, such as its tendency to the opaque (although not unexpected for this director), have melted away, and the return of these characters is like the return of old
Friends and old lovers.