The Souvenir: Part II, which opens in the immediate aftermath of the events of the first film, seems intent on considering two things: the fictional trauma caused by those events and the real-world criticism that the earlier movie itself received.
I wasn’t among those critics. I found The Souvenir—writer-director Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical tale of a film student in 1980s England who becomes involved with a duplicitous older man—to be a mesmerizing, artfully framed portrait of a treacherously complicated relationship. In the wake of the fatal overdose of Anthony (Tom Burke), The Souvenir: Part II finds Julie (Honor Swinton-Byrne) in a somewhat stunned place; she holds her love for him and her anger at his betrayal in the same hand.
Swinton-Byrne doesn’t miss a beat, even doubling down on the quiet interiority that defined her excellent earlier performance. Julie is crushed, instinctively returning for a brief stay with her parents (Tilda Swinton, Swinton-Byrne’s real-life mother, and James Spencer Ashworth) before trying to work through her grief and anger by immersing herself in her student thesis film. The subject? A fictionalized version of her and Anthony’s relationship (in other words, The Souvenir).
As if that wasn’t meta enough, Julie also finds herself fending off objections from her cast and crew that mirror some of the criticism the first movie received: that it was too inert, too inward-focused, and frustrating for those who couldn’t understand what Julie saw in Anthony. If that seems a bit defensive—again, I think the quiet delicacy of The Souvenir can stand on its own—it does allow us to see Julie’s steely, resilient side. She will not compromise here; her very life may depend upon it.
That would be enough to please admirers of the first film, but Hogg elevates The Souvenir: Part II with a climactic presentation of Julie’s finished film as part of a graduation ceremony. It plays like an intentionally awkward, fantastical variation on The Souvenir, but also offers a direct peek into Julie’s artistic vision. (She sees herself onscreen, for instance, rather than the actor who played the character during filming.) The movie’s final shot does something similar, which I won’t spoil, except to say that it’s an even more audacious melding of real-life experience and first-person filmmaking. Detractors might call it navel-gazing, but to me The Souvenir: Part II is introspection to adroit, therapeutic purpose.
(11/5/2021)
