The Souvenir (2019)

Directed by: Joanna Hogg | 120 minutes | drama | Actors: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton, Tom Burke, Tosin Cole, Jack McMullen, Frankie Wilson, Hannah Ashby Ward, Janet Etuk, Chyna Terrelonge-Vaughan, Alice McMillan, Barbara Peirson, James Dodds, James Spencer Ashworth, Richard Ayoade, Lydia Fox, Jaygann Ayeh, El Pilkington

England in the 1980s. Young film student Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) comes from a wealthy family and has exchanged her parents’ country house for a student flat. But one in the expensive London district of Knightsbridge, just about opposite the famous Harrods department store. She struggles with her cinematic ambitions. She wants to film a story that takes place in the circles of the working class in Sunderland, a life that is far from her own. Then she meets the older, mysterious Anthony (Tom Burke) at a party and falls in love with him. He is a civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he has a vague position and says his work ensures that no IRA bombs go off in her street. Her relationship with Anthony is quickly clouded when it turns out that he also has dark sides – and uses heroin. Julie has a complex relationship with her mother Rosaland, played by Tilda Swinton, who is also Honor Swinton Byrne’s mother in reality.

‘The Souvenir’ is a fragmented story about a doomed and troubled relationship that is not told chronologically and of which the viewer sometimes only sees fragments of conversations. From the beginning, Julie and Anthony have had a strange and unbalanced relationship. They don’t seem too in love with each other either. She clearly looks up to him, a well-groomed older man in a pinstripe suit who opens the world to her. He is above all an arrogant asshole who treats her very condescendingly – but at the same time as his unsympathetic attitude – also questions her assumptions and docile behavior. Julie’s naivety is sometimes verging on credibility when she doesn’t seem to want to see all the signs (lack of money and even theft) and physical markers of drug use. Even when she finally gets the truth to her, she stays with him. Does Julie perhaps contribute to the fact that this way she gets to see more of the “seamless side” of society? Or at least a different kind of life than she’s used to? She doesn’t belong anywhere: not in the milieu of her typically British upper-middle-class upbringing and not in the bohemian lifestyle and the hazy theories about films of her fellow students.

What makes ‘The Souvenir’ especially strong are the great acting performances of both Burke and mother and daughter Swinton. Burke knows how to give his slightly seedy, unreliable fraternity ball Anthony something tragic, so that you never completely hate him. Tilda Swinton is great in a supporting role as always as Julie’s slightly neurotic mother Rosalind and their scenes together are rock solid. Full of pinpricks, half reproaches and a difficult love. Burke manages to make Anthony’s despair over his descent almost tangible. In his eyes and facial expressions, Burke hints that he knows he will succumb to his addiction and be powerless to turn the tide. The control, the bravado is all illusion. The other lead – and an equally impressive one – is for Honor Swinton Byrne, she played a younger version of her mother as a child in 2009’s ‘Io sono l’amore’, but this is actually her professional debut. Her Julie is dreamy, but also determined to make something her life. even though she may not know exactly what yet.

Joanna Hogg gives her actors plenty of room to shine and often films them from a distance, from another room or through mirrors. Here Hogg tells a semi-autobiographical story about her younger years as a film school student, for which she meticulously reconstructed her own flat where she lived in an abandoned hangar of the British Air Force. The film does require some concentration: scenes sometimes seem only half finished, we catch fragments of conversations, previous discussions flare up again without the precise context being outlined. It is nicely constructed, but not an easy one. Those who empathize with the characters are richly rewarded.

A sequel to ‘The Souvenir’ will be released in 2021, again starring Honor Swinton Byrne and her mother Tilda.