There’s a Part II?

The Souvenir a film by Joanna Hogg.  With Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton.  **

I realize there’s no accounting for taste, but I like to have some idea in a movie why a woman is attracted to a man, and in the case of The Souvenir I don’t have a clue.  He’s somewhat older, seems to be a man of the world (he at least knows how to occupy an expensive drawing room or restaurant, as long as someone else picks up the check), but all we see  him do is sit there smoking—the man smokes endlessly—and saying snotty things to this younger and quite beautiful woman.  He’s not quite abusive, just kind of a turd.  She sits in what seems to be rapt fascination.  At some point, apparently, she falls in love.

I once mentioned to my friend and mentor Reynolds Price that I knew a wealthy woman who was in what seemed an abusive relationship, and he said something to the effect of, “Rich women do that.  They feel guilty.”  I suppose that’s a possibility, because Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), the young woman in question, is a film student in London[1] but has plenty of money.  She’s surrounded by bohemian friends who go on and on about film theory.  It’s all rather sophomoric and boring.  Maybe that’s why she’s attracted to Anthony (Tom Burke).  He doesn’t talk about movies all the time.

But she must notice that, almost every time he goes out, he asks to borrow “a tenner” (British money.  I had no idea how much he was soaking her.  The first time, he asked her for “a few quid,” like three, and wound up making it ten.  A bad sign.).  She gives this money gladly, also pays for their meals at the posh tea rooms that they like to eat in.  The Bohemian life of a film student this is not.  There’s actually a scene where they’re in bed and she sees needle tracks in his arm and says something to the effect of, “Oh dear.  Did you hurt yourself?  Are you all right?”  She still doesn’t realize—spoiler alert!—that the guy’s a heroin addict.  What a shock!  We thought he was just dull and slow, and loved cigarettes.

It isn’t until she and Anthony have dinner with an older and apparently successful filmmaker (who puts down film school as being virtually useless) that the filmmaker spills the beans.  Anthony steps out for a moment and the guy says something to the effect of, “So how did you two meet?  Are you a heroin addict too?”  (Small talk is not his strong suit.)  Julie looks stunned.  From that point on this becomes a movie about a young woman in love with an addict.

Apparently Joanna Hogg actually had this experience, and is trying to recreate it and perhaps to understand it.  One of her fellow students, in fact, someone she’d known since she was ten, was Tilda Swinton, so she cast her as Julie’s mother.  And when she couldn’t decide on an actress for Julie, she cast Swinton’s daughter, who hadn’t acted before[2].  My wife thought that the one superb thing about this movie was Honor Swinton Byrne’s performance, and I don’t exactly disagree.  I had so little understanding of Julie that I couldn’t see whether Byrne was portraying her well or not.  I kept thinking, what is such a beautiful young woman doing with such a dullard.  Who’s also a deadbeat.  And a heroin addict.  What does she see in him?  How stupid can she be?

There’s a moment two-thirds of the way through when Julie gets tired of his addictive behavior and orders him out of her house.  At last, I thought.  She’s taking charge of her life.  She even gets together with another film student, someone closer to his age.  For some reason, we see this young man take all his clothes off and stand before the camera fully naked, apparently because that’s the way he appeared to young Joanna Hogg.  Someone needs to explain to Hogg that physically duplicating a moment from your past does not create a work of art.  Didn’t they explain that in film school?  Maybe she was out with Anthony that day.

Somehow—despite the fact that the entire audience is screaming internally for her to do otherwise—she takes Anthony back.  There’s a scene where we see him in full withdrawl, and it’s frightening in the way that such scenes always are.  Finally there’s a scene where—Major Spoiler Alert—Julie’s mother is staying with her, and the phone rings, and the news is, as her mother reports, “Worst possible.”  Except that she should have said, “Best possible.”  Anthony has died of an overdose.  Julie will get her life back.  And most importantly of all, the movie is coming to a close.

Imagine my shock when I heard there is a Souvenir Part II.  Don’t tell me he comes back to life (a la Fatal Attraction)?  Or that Julie starts to shoot up?  I suppose I’ll never find out, because if I have to sit through two more hours of this tedious crap I’ll start shooting up myself.  The Souvenir takes artistic pretension and self-absorption to a whole new level.  A. O. Scott says it’s his favorite movie this year.  What’s the poor boy been watching?

[1] As was the director at one time, Joanna Hogg.  In fact, she’s been frank in saying that this movie is about her own experience, to the extent that she’s duplicated the posh apartment she lived in and even the view out the window.

[2] According to one place on the IMDb website.  In another spot it says she played the child version of her mother in a movie ten years ago.