Gilly-13 Review of The Souvenir

The Souvenir (2019)

I had to "solve" this film, but it was worth it.

[8/10 · 24 October 2019]

Like many, I was bored and confused after viewing "The Souvenir", but I had recently watched and liked Joanna Hogg's "Unrelated" (2007), so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and thought it over. Like some other reviewers, something came to me the next day. I'm not a "feeling" kind of guy, so I have to work to appreciate her method of getting across an emotional complex and the way she will use the whole film to lead to a pinpoint, deep-drill moment of emotional elucidation. In "The Souvenir", I came to think she was portraying Julie as a sort of emotional vampire, vicariously using the troubled life of her lover, Anthony, to fill in the blanks of her previously vapid, upper-middle-class existence--borrowing some misery to give her enough empathy to be able to relate to less fortunate beings in order to fulfill her artistic ambition to be a filmmaker. The hints are there: her frustrated attempt at a working-class documentary; the advice from more than one source, to work from her own experience--the thing she lacks; her insincere credulity at finding needlemarks on Anthony's arm (you were right, nobody is THAT naive), and again when her flat is ransacked; her blind eye to where he goes with the money he borrows from her--an employee of the British foreign office borrowing constantly from a no-income film student. It occurred to me that this was the reason Joanna Hogg gave Honor Swynton Byrne her journals and materials from that time instead of a script in order to keep the actress as naive and unaware of her own motives as Hogg, herself, must have been at that age in this semi-autobiographical study. Then there was the extended discussion of the murder scene in "Psycho". The iconic portrayal of a brutal stabbing without any depiction of the actual physical violence. Julie says little, but has the last word in the discussion, (from memory) "You don't see the actual killing, but you see the end result." Congruently, you don't see Anthony's death, but the end results: the news of his overdose in the bathroom of an art gallery and the lack of remorse on Julie's part, contrasted with the excellent expression of grief by Tilda Swynton, the enormously talented mother of the character, as well as the actress,. And then the solution came to me when I rememberd the "Joanna Hogg moment"--that magnificent shot where Swynton Byrne turns her concentration from directing a film--the attainment of her film student goal--and glares impassively, directly, and most un-naively into Joanna Hogg's camera. Now, we all knew that was meant to be very cinematically significant, but I honestly didn't understand the significance until I solved the rest of the movie--that final, unblinking glare at the audience was Julie saying, "Yeah, I'm an upper class brat, and I got what I wanted. TFB if my junkie boyfriend died." And that realization with the memory of the defiant glare from her pallid, emotionless face made my blood run cold just as my mail carrier plucked the DVD from my mailbox the next day. I won't watch it again, but I recommend that the bored and confused give it some reconsideration.