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Once in a while, Julie meets up with her protective mother (a brittle and Thatcher-chic Tilda Swinton, Honor’s actual mom), or hovers in the background of one of her film school classes. As per usual in Hogg’s films — in which a severe aesthetic clashes against improvised dialogue in order to create a destabilizing friction between order and chaos — these episodes are both rigid and hyper-naturalistic at the same time, like someone desperately trying to thread together the logic of a dream they once had. A handheld camera shooting a soft film stock in shallow focus touches everything with a fuzzy sense of romance, frustrating Julie’s growing need for clarity. She’s only outdoors for a few quick seconds of this two-hour movie, and it isn’t long before a certain claustrophobia to sink in through the walls, as though Hogg’s young stand-in might suffocate to death if she can’t escape herself and find her place in the world.
But it’s Anthony who hems her in more than anything else. Julie might see him as her bridge to some kind of broader experience (she’s eager to ignore class, erase her own privilege, and think of her boyfriend’s addiction as more of a quirk than a problem), but Anthony relies on heroin more than he relies on her, and it’s only a matter of time before he starts to steamroll over Julie’s creative ambition. Mercifully, that rancid process subverts expectations. Hogg avoids the sort of histrionic screaming matches that you might expect from the material, and Julie — for better or worse — is all too happy to put Anthony’s needs before her own. She loves his feral unpredictability, and never tries to tame him. She knows that all of this might be the stuff of a great movie one day.
“The Souvenir,” by its very nature, can’t shame her for that. Not only does the film revolve around an artist who’s learning how to oxidize her pain into something productive, it’s also the product of Hogg’s own process; a tender history of its own making. It may have taken Hogg several decades to realize that her own box of darkness was actually a beautiful gift, but she unwraps it with the care and tenderness of someone who understands its true value. We may never know who gave it to her — if the “Anthony” from her own life is similar to the one she created on screen — but her gratitude for him reverberates so clearly through the unforgettable final shots of this film that even Hogg’s most painful memories are reborn into something beautiful. “We want to see life not as it’s lived,” Anthony tells Julie, “but as it’s experienced within this soft machine.” “The Souvenir” allows us to do just that. And with Hogg slated to shoot a direct sequel with Byrne and Robert Pattinson this summer, it may be a gift that keeps on giving.
Grade: A
“The Souvenir” premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. A24 will release it later this year.
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