Joanna Hogg, painterly, modernist Brit filmmaker utilizing static frames, uneasy vibes

hi!

I finally got round to Souvenir II and thought it was better and intellectually richer than the first. It does annoy me, though, to hear Hogg say in all her interviews that her movies aren't about class - I mean, maybe they aren't to her, but she must see they're going to be to just about anyone else watching them. The first hurdle to jump for anyone watching either of the Souvenirs is why should I sympathise with someone who seems to have been given everything, who while studying in London is not sharing a grotty basement bedsit in Camberwell (as I was) but a spacious, airy apartment in Knightsbridge. And who can casually ask her Mum for 10,000 pounds to finish her school project - in the mid-80s that would have been the average annual household income! She's working through the terrible thing that happened to her - but with resources even the relatively well off can only dream of.

Never listen to/read artists talk about anything except mixology.

The first hurdle to jump for anyone watching either of the Souvenirs is why should I sympathise with someone who seems to have been given everything, who while studying in London is not sharing a grotty basement bedsit in Camberwell (as I was)

I guess I don't need every cinematic experience or story to be a reflection of my own life in order to find something to enjoy about it. Note that I also like things like Jane Austen adaptations, and Shakespeare plays about Princes and Kings.

I'm still baffled by those comments.

i was pleased to see "Julie" in the Eternal Daughter wearing a dress to the birthday party with the same pattern as one she'd worn at a birthday party in the Souvenir (can't remember if it was in the first or second one)

i get zelda zonk's post and think it's a valid response, clearly stated, don't see what's baffling about it at all, although to be fair i haven't seen the film. that kind of class conscious response to contemporary art is more useful than most criticism i see. i also think akm's rebuttal is a poor one generally speaking but also specifically for the analogies of jane austen and shakespeare. just had to say all that for the record lol.

it's bizarre to say the 'first hurdle for anyone is to get over this issue that I have personally have', to me anyway. it's clearly not the first hurdle, or any kind of hurdle at all, for many people.

so class consciousness is a personal issue hmmm

I believe I've already run up against these issues with you in some other threads and my take is that this is not the only, or primary, metric against which the value of art should be measured.

I wasn't baffled by Zelda Zonk's post -- I was baffled by the criticism upthread posted a couple years ago, which I reread this morning.

I think it's an informative frame in thinking about art but doesn't have to be a dominant one. (Vaguely reminds me of some early response to Taylor Swift on ILM, basically "Who cares what a privileged affluent white girl thinks about anything?")

Hogg is certainly a chronicler of affluence and not a terribly critical one, at least in the sense that her critiques aren't of affluence per se. Though you could certainly argue that in her movies characters mostly use their privilege to try to hide from unhappiness/insecurities/alienation, and generally fail.

I guess I'm pretty taken with Hogg's by now three-part project: it's rare to see so many hours of film by a female writer-director about a budding female writer-director. I'll concede that we can't wave aside the class consciousness: who's paying the bills, who gets their project approved. I thought of Leonard Woolf giving Virginia money for her pens and paper. Her artistry and often her sanity depended on the small genuine kindnesses of a man, a lesser writer. She also inherited iirc some of her dad's $$ too. How a particular kind of 20th century female voice shaped by where they stood in the class structure and how much they got from male patrons strikes me as one of the Hogg Project's overtones.

Afraid I was left pretty much unmoved by The Souvenir Part II, enjoyed it as I watched it but just felt I took nothing away at the end, it also felt like a piece of work in denial of its own privilege, so a bit self-indulgent, but if it connected with other people maybe that's not fair.

Guess what it came down to for me was that for all the difficulties and sadness in her life, there was never real struggle. That's not the experience of 99% of people. I'm not saying every British filmmaker needs to be Ken Loach, but having no glimpse of the void of despair in a film featuring addiction and death just stops it having any real bite.

Her love for that heroin-addicted Tory counts as struggle, no? And in the second film she wants the mostly male milieu to take her film seriously.

I should add that I really like the Hogg films I've seen. And you can certainly read a class critique into them, most people will, but it seems Hogg herself doesn't really. I saw her first one, Unrelated, the other day, which definitely reads like a critique of a bunch of arrogant upper class Brits being unpleasant to each other and the Italian locals - but reading interviews with Hogg, she says it's not the way she sees it, she's simply focused on the travails of the 40something protagonist.

As for the Souvenirs, I like them for a lot of the reasons Alfred mentions. But I did find Julie's extreme privilege - which is way more than your average white middle class privilege - is something I needed to get past mentally before enjoying the film. It's not the same as Austen or Shakespeare, whose worlds are temporally and psychologically far removed from our own. Hogg is recreating a world that is pretty much the same as our own and in the lived experience of many, and then asks us to care about someone who has extraordinary and very untypical resources at her disposal to deal with her (very real) tragedy. That doesn't make the films bad, but it certainly begs questions.

I haven't seen part 1, maybe I should. Don't think her struggle to get the film taken seriously was so much about the industry men (aside from a couple of scenes of course) but about her inability to communicate with her crew/classmates, which is something I could have been interested in, but it never really seemed to be dealt with.

i don't think this film would make a lick of sense if you hadn't seen part 1.

Good post, Zelda.

Camaraderie, I'd say Richard Ayoade's Patrick is there to give Julie the necessary tension: gay and Black, certainly not privileged.

I always like Richard Ayoade, and enjoyed his scenes, would have liked a lot more of him in there.

Should note that Jane Austin did not write a book about a young female writer from immense privilege trying to write a book and get it published with funding from her parents.

But Austen, who lived at home, did write a novel about young rich people putting on a play!

I agree, though, her world is sci-fi to us.

I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm) at 10:42 27 Dec 22

i don't think this film would make a lick of sense if you hadn't seen part 1.

lol I hear ya

saw the eternal daughter. it was a lot of tilda swinton. a lot. too much really. and the pitch of the neurosis. again too much. tiring.

BUT there was a sort of howling mystery around it all that also gave it power. and it's just great to see someone making a film that references turn of the screw henry james (both the original story and the innocents), and They by Kipling is explicitly quoted, as it were. this is exactly in that mode, the psychological dominating the gothic. the haunting also v evident. the hotel receptionist is *amazing* as is Louis the dog.

Joanna Hogg's treatment of light, sound, weather, interiors and dress is masterly, just wonderful. it won't be a film to see on tv, where I suspect it will be too dark. it was very good to see, generally, the bedroom scenes properly grainy (it used to drive my parents mad that in most films when someone switched out the light, the bedroom suddenly became lighter than when it had been on. a necessary mechanic perhaps, but Hogg really works at the light levels.

it might in one reading be seen as a reverse turn of the screw/they tbh.

also, when someone else sees this - post here if you find it reasonable to say the shining is both an oblique but also obvious and slightly “wut?” reference point.

hi!

: )

so, i mean im not sure if im being weird about this but the deployment of *kindly black man as hotel caretaker* was both hilariously obvious and also made me go “wait, what? why?”

I mentioned The Shining in my review, but thought this was kind of creaky tbh. Particularly the kindly old black guy’s eerie flute habit. Would make a good double bill with All Of Us Strangers though.

Creaky or total mess is what I've been circling around. But I quite *enjoyed* that it was trying to do a lot and especially that it was working in the gothic frame to test the deterioration of uppper middle class neurosis and grief, plugging in and reversing the children-as-revenants on guilt ridden parents. Although sometimes it felt like it all landed on the pastiche, with major concerns (death, ghosts) in service of the minor (manners).

It reminded me a bit of my reaction to Jen Calleja's novel Vehicle. I didn't think it was very good, at all really, but I was pleased that it existed and people were doing things in this vein, playing with the possibilities. What's the line from Annie Dillard? "The writer knows his field - what has been done, what could be done, the limits - the way a tennis player knows the court. ANd like that expert, he, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. He hits up the edges. In writing, he can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil."

I think this film is probably in that latter space, but i'm pleased someone is testing the edges of it.

Still too much Tilda, even if the editing was impressive.

the "two parts Hammer, one part Tales of the Unexpected" headline quote from Graun makes this sound appealing to me but somehow I don't think it will be an accurate summation of a J Hogg movie

yeah, that's incorrect! the performance of Carly-Sophia Davies as the hotel receptionist is worth the admission price alone though!

In a strong month for dogs in movies (the mutts in Fallen Leaves and Anatomy of a Fall are v good too), Tilda’s springer spaniel may be the best.

iirc Kaurismaki was a good director of woofers in the other side of hope as well

have been quietly stewing all afternoon over the level of critical idiocy reflected in that guardian quote, calz.

I haven't seen the movie yet but I thought that either is an absolute clunker of a headline quote or a radical departure for J Hogg, the former being the odds on fav!

Upthread I called it her slightest film, but I think of it a little more kindly now. It's audacious to do the third part of an autobiographical trilogy as a gothic ghost story, and it pays off nicely at the end.

The privilege discussion upthread puts me in mind of Sofia Coppola, who I think has a similarly ambiguous posture toward her privilege and the world she occupies.

Mentions of 'Hammer Horror' are almost always a sign of critical carelessness, especially in the Guardian.

my bf was so infuriated by an interview with tilda swinton's daughter that he now refuses to watch any movies by j hogg

Lol, got a link?

I read a graun interview with HSB and was bristling a fair bit at the smugness and nepo-brat quotient and all the usual shit (private school education, idyllic country house) but lol, despite this I'd still watch a Hogg movie!

This film added up to less than the sum of its parts, other than the aforementioned Carly-Sophia Davies. Maybe it needed more heaving bosoms, if it is indeed "two parts Hammer"?

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Tilda seemed to be cured of her psychotic episode quite sharpish at the conclusion!

I think this was it: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jan/23/honor-swinton-byrne-interview-souvenir-tilda-joanna-hogg

"“From what I understand, she couldn’t find Julie in these posey professional actresses who were very comfortable in front of a camera. She just said they’re all too pretty. And then she cast me. Which, you know, I took as a compliment,” says Swinton Byrne. She lets out a throaty laugh, wriggles her feet out of a pair of sparkly stilettos and snuggles herself more comfortably into a sofa at the upmarket central London hotel that is the base for her first solo publicity round, for the sequel to that first film."

Yer faither wid be proud

that quote nails it!

idk I like the sass. American actors are reluctant to show it.

Thanks for that link plax, understand your bf's reaction.

This film added up to less than the sum of its parts, other than the aforementioned Carly-Sophia Davies. Maybe it needed more heaving bosoms, if it is indeed "two parts Hammer"?

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Tilda seemed to be cured of her psychotic episode quite sharpish at the conclusion!

Great comment.. Did the film need that malevolent detachment? Is that mode even Hogg's specialty?