Joanna Hogg has never been afraid of the dark – the vast empty spaces that exist between people in apparently intimate relationships. In Archipelago she painted a portrait of a family as fractured as the scattered land masses of Scilly; lonely islands separated by treacherous choppy waters. In Exhibition she put a fractious couple in an up-for-sale London townhouse that seemed specifically designed to keep them apart; the architecture of isolation.
The Souvenir, on which Martin Scorsese served as an executive producer, continues Hogg’s unflinching examination of personal distance, focusing on a couple who seem to live in an atmosphere of silent deceit and highly choreographed concealment.Yet this autobiographically inspired drama is also her most intimate film to date, boasting scenes that play like pages torn from an experiential diary.
While previous works may have taken a scalpel to characters and situations with which the film-maker is clearly familiar, here Hogg turns the blade on herself, performing what seems at times to be a delicate act of on-screen auto-vivisection. It’s powerful stuff: wryly tender, frequently funny, but insidiously suffocating. More than once I found myself stifling a scream – and I mean that as a compliment.
Like the subject matter, Hogg keeps the casting close to home, enlisting her goddaughter Honor Swinton Byrne to play 1980s film student Julie. While struggling to find her own directorial voice, Julie falls into the orbit of Anthony (Tom Burke), a chain-smoking roué with an air of insouciant arrogance; a “to-the-manner-born” attitude that repels and seduces simultaneously. Anthony claims to work for the Foreign Office, although a question mark hangs over everything he says.
At first, Anthony acts as a mentor to Julie, their exchanges possessing an off-kilter, businesslike quality, as if some shady deal is being done that no one fully understands. Even when they become “a couple”, they continue to conduct their affairs in an unsettling, disconnected fashion, fetishised through the rituals of expensive lunches, tangential conversations and weirdly weaponised gifts of clothing.
It’s no surprise that Anthony has secrets, or that these secrets should prove increasingly poisonous. Even his oldest friends seem to find him potentially malignant, and wonder what Julie is doing with him (“I’m trying to work out how you two… tesselate,” says Patrick, played in a razor-sharp cameo by Richard Ayoade). “You’re lost,” Anthony tells Julie, “and you’ll always be lost.”
It’s a quietly cruel assessment, an echo of the ambiguity of the Fragonard painting (whose subject may be either “sad” or “determined”) from which the film takes its title, and which hangs over the unfolding relationship like the sword of Damocles. There’s a sense of watching a car crash in slow motion, the after-effects of which will apparently be explored in The Souvenir: Part II, which has already been shot.
As with all of Hogg’s work, it’s what people don’t say that matters. Watching the film for a second time, I kept thinking of the words of the penitential prayer that asks forgiveness for “what we have done”, and (more damningly) “what we have left undone”, as if the spectres of both guilt and salvation lie in the space between actions. That sense of absence is heightened by Helle le Fevre’s editing, which adds sharp edges to David Raedeker’s glowing 16mm cinematography, and encourages us to fill in the gaps as we peer through the cracks of this mysterious love story.
Particular plaudits are due to Tom Burke, who gives a career-best performance that is brilliantly enigmatic, a mesmerising blend of predation and vulnerability. While Burke’s Anthony seems practised in the art of deception, Swinton Byrne’s Julie is all hesitancy and uncertainty, a quality nurtured by Hogg’s use of improvisation to keep her central character guessing. As Julie’s mother, Rosalind, Tilda Swinton has the air of one about to crack, like a slightly chipped porcelain cup. Hogg’s work with actors has always been exceptional, but here she is at the top of her game, making each role count by maintaining that balance of closeness and separation that is her trademark.
