Joanna Hogg scored “a deserved arthouse hit” with 2019’s The Souvenir, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman – “a brilliantly rendered slice of self-lacerating autofiction dramatising her early years as a young film student in 1980s London”. The Souvenir Part II picks up where the first film left off. Hogg’s alter ego Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is reeling from the death of her boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke), and decides to “process her grief by using her imminent thesis film to try and find out who he really was” – and “who she is” at the same time. “Heavy going as it sounds”, the film is “drily funny”, with “layers of meta-gags courtesy of Tilda Swinton’s return as Julie’s artistically dissatisfied mother” Rosalind, and Richard Ayoade’s hilarious turn as a pretentious film-maker.
Swinton Byrne is once again “terrific”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, but the real stars here are her posh on-screen parents. They clearly love their only child, but “can only nibble at the edges of showing that”; watching them fail to emote is “painfully touching”. If Hogg were to make The Souvenir Part III: Rosalind and James Walk Their Springer Spaniels, I’d watch it in a shot. This film won’t delight everyone – there’s not much plot (Hogg simply “presents her actors with a prose synopsis and they go from there”), and as a film about film-making, the whole thing is “super-meta” – but I was riveted.
Alas, I found it all rather empty, said Kevin Maher in The Times. The film is “rigorously shot” and “intellectually cogent”, but it sacrifices emotional heft for “smarty-pants postmodernism”, and is so wrapped up in what happened in Part I that it seems totally bereft of “any visceral beats of its own”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
The ‘menopause gold rush’Under the Radar Women vulnerable to misinformation and marketing of ‘unregulated’ products
-
Voting Rights Act: SCOTUS’s pivotal decisionFeature A Supreme Court ruling against the Voting Rights Act could allow Republicans to redraw districts and solidify control of the House
-
No Kings rally: What did it achieve?Feature The latest ‘No Kings’ march has become the largest protest in U.S. history
-
Roasted squash and apple soup recipeThe Week Recommends Autumnal soup is full of warming and hearty flavours
-
6 well-crafted log homesFeature Featuring a floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace in Montana and a Tulikivi stove in New York
-
Film reviews: A House of Dynamite, After the Hunt, and It Was Just an AccidentFeature A nuclear missile bears down on a U.S. city, a sexual misconduct allegation rocks an elite university campus, and a victim of government terror pursues vengeance
-
Book reviews: ‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ and ‘Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It’Feature Gertrude Stein’s untold story and Jane Leavy’s playbook on how to save baseball
-
Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into ArtFeature Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Dec. 7
-
Music reviews: Olivia Dean, Madi Diaz, and Hannah FrancesFeature “The Art of Loving,” “Fatal Optimist,” and “Nested in Tangles”
-
Gilbert King’s 6 favorite books about the search for justiceFeature The journalist recommends works by Bryan Stevenson, David Grann, and more
-
Ready for the apocalypseFeature As anxiety rises about the state of the world, the ranks of preppers are growing—and changing.
