AUTHENTICITY: The Souvenir (2019, wri/dir Joanna Hogg, w/ Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton, 120mns, UK)

Joanna Hogg's THE SOUVENIR is a beautiful film for the very reasons that it may turn off some.

This semi-autobiograpical story charts the doomed love between affluent British student filmmaker Julie (a beautifully calibrated Honor Swinton Byrne) and self-destructive Anthony (Tom Burke in commendable Bronte protagonist form), an arrogant yet soulful foreign service staffer with a heroin addiction.

Julie's loving if traditionalist mother Rosalind (Byrne's real life mother and international actor supreme Tilda Swinton) observes from afar.

The frustrations of the movie are its triumphs. Hogg doesn't shy away from nor change the things that might alienate the audience. 

This is a movie about affluent Britons. Julie is a student film maker with access to her family's money whenever she needs it. Anthony lies, controls, manipulates from the beginning. And yet Julie stays in the relationship long after it makes sense to the audience. The movie stays true to the soul of British character. Since this writer is an American that final observation can only be a surmise. Maybe it's wrong.

But the movie feels defiant in its Britishness. 

Hogg admirably shows that moments of tremendous true love and romance and connection can co-exist with lies, obliviousness, and darkness.

As if that weren't enough temptation to turn the movie off to an audience not inclined to feel empathy for such folks, Hogg threads a meta-cinema dialectic through the narrative. We keep coming back to Julie discussing the kind of movie she wants to make, shooting her movie, discussing it with cast, crew, staff of her film school. And it's clear from the first scene of the movie that these scenes of moviemaking are commenting on the very movie we are watching. 

When authors and moviemakers can pull off this kind of split-address, meta-narrative, it does provide a deep enrichment of the material. But more often than not, it can feel self-indulgent. 

And yet it is this commitment to truth and authenticity and embracing approaches fraught with narrative risk that gives the movie its undeniable greatness.

This is a movie about an intense love relationship. And while Anthony may be a time bomb (like the IRA terrorist bombings he's always talking about via his foreign office work which we come to doubt he does), he also has a charm, intelligence, and sensuality.

In fact, he appears to profoundly understand Julie and be able to offer piercing constructive (if brutal) observations that affect her deeply.

And dysfunctional relationships that nevertheless have real love, empathy, forgiveness, and understanding aren't native to any country. They may be the universal language.

Filmmaker Hogg has her own film grammar. Grounded static master shots are intercut with Super 8mm footage of the same scene. The movie takes place in the early 1980's with classic early 80's needle drops (representing Julie) juxtopposed with operatic symphonic cues (representing Anthony). 

There is also an empathy that courses through the movie both in Julie's character and Hogg's filmmaking. Nevertheless, the storytelling has a painful precision. 

Watching someone you love who has lied to you going down the drain…

THE SOUVENIR has undercurrents of a WUTHERING HEIGHTS or JANE EYRE for a 1980's Thatcherite UK torn between liberal reform and conservative reaction. Anthony is the kind of brooding cocky domineering male a smart independent woman like Julie is supposed NOT to fall for. And yet Anthony has a soulfulness and power that other disciplined milquetoast alternatives don't. A danger. A sexuality. 

And often we're the last to see the glaring flaws in our romantic partners.

Hogg shows how Julie's Mother's (at least initial) obliviousness may transfer to Julie herself. It is Julie who seems to be the last one to realize Anthony has a heroin habit. And she's sleeping and living with him.

It is just stunning and impressive that Hogg achieves her storytelling power by leaning into the very things most filmmakers would shy away from. Or bungle.

This may be what makes her great. 

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club