The Souvenir: Part II

After the death of her boyfriend Anthony, Julie goes back to film school. She decides to change her graduation film: she abandons the script she wrote and will shoot the relationship she lived through instead. Everyone at the school objects; the crew does not understand it, the tutors propose something else, and Julie does not entirely know what she is filming either. Joanna Hogg writes and directs. Honor Swinton Byrne plays Julie and Tilda Swinton plays her mother; they are mother and daughter in life as well. This continues the first film of 2019, and the pair are drawn from Hogg's own youth. She was at film school in the early eighties, and the relationship she describes was lived. What the sequel does is question the first film. As Julie tries to shoot what happened she does not know whether what she remembers is true; the film asks itself the same question, which is why the second one stands as a commentary on the first. The set passages are the best thing in it. The daily business of making a film, the arguments inside the crew and the fights over money are shown without any romance. Towards the end the narrative leaves realism for a deliberately artificial, stage set section, and that choice is the most argued over thing in the film. Who it is for: viewers who like Joanna Hogg, films about filmmaking, and slow British drama. Who it is not for: do not begin without the first film, the pace is very slow, and the class world of the characters can keep you at a distance.