Review: The Souvenir/dir. Joanna Hogg

"While watching the film one is subsumed into its quiet intensity and grainy beauty, urged to lean in closer to the intimate spaces and then kindly asked to leave."

The Souvenir is a film that captures the moments just before or just after the conflict, it presents the charged rooms of lingering or anticipatory emotion: the walk to the opera but not the opera itself. In her fourth feature film, British Director Joanna Hogg presents a loose, fictionalized interpretation of her own young life during the 1980s in film school and in a complicated, toxic relationship testing the waters of her naivete. Hogg drains the film of the drama that audiences have come to expect from their cinema, leaving only the scaffolding of the past and acknowledging the inadequacies of telling one’s story through art. 

The film plays in moments and visual modes, dense imagery, and exacting mise-en-scene are consistently favored over narrative conventions. An observant camera-distance stays just out of reach of the characters. The few POV shots in the film are flooded with light or odd angles, showing the heightened recollection that memories burn into a psyche, an amalgam of real and imagined: the overlit porn-like stalk to a bed, the well-framed still life of an addict’s accessories. 

The film also plays in impressions, the soft, hazy details that add to a sense of time and place: a song, the streetlights, the slow seam running up the back of a leg hugged in silk stockings. While watching the film one is subsumed into its quiet intensity and grainy beauty urged to lean in closer to the intimate spaces and then kindly asked to leave. Joanna Hogg doesn’t want to try to relive or blatantly recreate her personal experiences, she wants to wash over the audience with their feeling. One can never know another’s life but by crafting a sharable sensory experience, Hogg halts one’s identification with the protagonist instead leaving space to recall one’s own distinct memories that her cinematic stimulations evoke. 

The Souvenir is a study in how cinema tries desperately to capture the strange essence (or maybe nostalgia?) of reality and perception. The film seems to assert that no one can ever truly know another whether onscreen or offscreen, an honesty that makes the film enticingly raw. So what then is the point of telling or consuming one’s story? What is the point of cinema? Creativity is a shared dream that can communicate understanding, control, hope in the painful freefall of life. Maybe all escapes-- drugs, religion, Instagram, cinema-- are ways in which to forget the remembering. We make and go to the movies to collectively process, we make and go to the movies to not feel so alone. 

The Souvenir premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was released in theaters by A24 in May.