Joanna Hogg’s new film, “The Souvenir: Part II,” belongs to a classic modern genre: it’s a movie about the making of a movie. Its protagonist, Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne), is a London film student in the late nineteen-eighties who’s preparing to make her thesis movie. Hogg depicts both the efforts that go into its production and the thesis film itself—and the contrast between the dramatization of Julie’s life and the film that Julie makes is the intellectual essence of Hogg’s movie.
In Hogg’s 2017 film “The Souvenir,” set in early-eighties London, Julie (played by Swinton Byrne, then in her first movie role), signs up for film school and gets involved with a haughty and acerbic man named Anthony (Tom Burke), who turns out to be a heroin addict. Julie struggles to find her footing at school, and the relationship founders on Anthony’s lies and misdeeds. In “The Souvenir: Part II,” Julie is grieving for Anthony and attempting to take stock of the relationship as, meanwhile, she gains experience working on other people’s films. Her professors (older white men) deem the new script for her thesis film (which is different from the one she’d planned to make in “The Souvenir”) unacceptably unprofessional—but she undertakes it nevertheless, with a substantial loan from her parents (played by the actress’s real-life mother, Tilda Swinton, and James Spencer Ashworth), who live in a lavish house on an enormous spread of land.
Sourse: newyorker.com
