Monday, July 15, 2019

Driver (Israel, 2017)

“A story is never a lie,” Nachman Rosumani tells his assistant. He encourages him to ramp up the pathos in his personal plea for a charitable handout. 
That’s true insofar as a real story and an invented story can have equal effect on either the teller or the told. The emotional truth trumps the incidental. Indeed Nachman works himself up to tears as he invents a story for his aide to explot. As one bereaved observes, "Everything melts." 
This Orthodox Jewish elaboration upon Paper Moon centers on a conman and his sensitive young daughter. Driver Nachman sends his adult male assistant off to specific addresses with a tale of woe to solicit personal donations. They will split the proceeds fifty-fifty. The con depends upon  the Jewish commitment to tzedokkah, charity. It works, more or less, until someone steals Nachman’s notebook, with personal details on all the wealthy men in the orthodox Jerusalem community of Bnai Brak. Then "What's a driver worth without addresses?"
The film is a gossamer tissue of stories. Characters reprise their dreams. The cafe denizens take turns recalling their first memory. The characters’ lives are enriched by their memory of, for example, a cat discovered nursing its newborn in a dark basement, or recollecting the smell of the rebbe’s wife’s egg hitting the margarine. If not enriched, then explained: Nachman’s is his four-year-old son’s recent death, after which nothing was the same.
Their business schemes begin as stories. One man plans to fill a borrowed truck with stolen prams, to sell in the West Bank. That brainchild is replaced by another, to drive a truckload of snow from Jerusalem to sell as a cavorting pleasure in Bnai Brak, where it never snows.
The climactic revelation of “story” is the film’s last shot. When Nachman’s buddies deliver the snow they discover the neighborhood has just been thus miraculously blanketed. The last shot is that freakish setting, an obviously false image of an urban snowscape pocked with the local citizens. They are static, like cutouts or figures painted into the backdrop. Or they are frozen stiff, caught in the “story” not to be warmed by it.
The last shot’s artifice confesses to the fictitiousness of the narrative we’ve been watching. Of course we know we’ve been watching ”a story” as if it were real life. We always do. But here the artifice is the key message of the shot. Even the false shot is as effective as the “real,” which really isn’t either. 
Nachman is committed to stories. To pass the time he phones any nearby payphone and asks the passerby to tell him “one little story.” 
In the first such episode, the elderly Hedva reports her old husband Shmuel doesn’t remember her anymore. She wants to restore his memory by playing his favourite Beatles record but she has no phonograph. Nachman notes her address, as if planning to help. When she returns home we see her husband remembers her — but she doesn’t recognize him. Truth and pretence are inextricably confused. 
Nachman has become such an accomplished fabulist that even his simple truth can work. Coming upon an amusement park closed for the winter, his simple request convinces the caretaker to open to give Nachman and Channi a ride on the ferris wheel. 
More seriously, Nachman and Channi score big even though the donor recognizes him as the driver who brings him all the beggars. Indeed the donor had cheaply turned away Nachman’s last agent. As it happens, Nachum’s winning story here is apparently the truth —  his son’s death and his broken-hearted wife’s retreat to Tel Aviv. Nachum and Channi don’t need their “story” of her expensive and urgent surgery. Even when Nachman declines the money, "Do me a favour--take it." The emotional story performs a human value, true or false.  
     This superb, quiet drama is written and directed by Yehonatan Indurksy who, with Ori Elon, conceived and wrote the brilliant television drama Shtisel. The interplay between levels of reality is also a central theme in that drama. It’s in the opening scene — Akiva’s dream discovering his recently deceased mother freezing in a deli lunch with an Eskimo. It’s in the first season’s closing scene — Malka isolated from her family, her TV cruelly disconnected, left in its snow. It’s in the first season’s last shot, Malka and her dead husband watching her hospital coma scene in Heaven on the TV forbidden her on earth. It runs through the various forms of art in both seasons, as well. For my episode-by-episode analysis of the structure and themes see my book Reading Shtisel, available at lulu.com, amazon and barnes & noble.    

Sunday, July 14, 2019

A Tramway In Jerusalem

Amos Gitai presents the title’s two phrases in reverse: In Jerusalem A Tramway. It first establishes the place, then the means of entrance. This slice-of-life miscellany takes us East-West through the Jewish and Arab districts of the Holy City. In both the political and personal stories, people are on the same tram but going “in different directions,” as the brittle couple Moshe and Didi remark. 
     The film is in the tradition of the old narrenschiff -- The Ship of Fools. A cross-section of human society reveal themselves and their relationships in a confined vehicle of transport, a reduction of the journey of life. The American classic is Stagecoach (1939).
Despite an apparent incoherence, the film has a firm structure. It’s framed by scenes of two beautiful women profiled on the left side of the screen singing. The opening song (declared at 5 a.m.) is the joyous Hebrew hymn Hasheeveinu: “Turn us back, O Lord to You, and we will turn. Renew our days as before” (Lamentations 5:21).  At the end a beautiful Palestinian woman sings an Arabic song (pssst: I’d welcome a translation), accompanying herself atonally with castanets. 
In the pivotal Episode 6 (at 19:12) a Palestinian man declares the Oslo Accord delusional in its treatment of Judea and Samaria. He sullenly predicts there will never be a Palestinian state. The pretty woman with him rejects his despair. She won’t be considered “a demographic problem. A thorn in the ass,” but retreats to a long silent meditation. That’s like the woman at the end of the first episode, but far more melancholy. The film’s finale will finally give the Palestinian woman a voice. 
Between the women’s perspective in #1 and #6 fall scenes of male authority — and folly. In #2 (set at 12:31) the camera zooms past an orthodox Jew’s wordless banjo number to a French father and his young son, lying together in pensive warmth. Other passengers sing along happily. The communal singalong resumes in #3 at 18:45, with a religious/political point: “The world is a very narrow bridge. What’s really important is not to be afraid at all.” 
The singing is replaced by a dubious yeshiva lecture in #4 (19:34). The earnest young scholar explains that the Torah advises that shooing the mother bird away from her nest is humane. It saves her from seeing she is losing her children. That’s a guy thing. Her loss is hardly eased by her not seeing it happen. For this tight exclusive knot of men, religious logic betrays human responsibility and values secrecy over responsibility. The political pertinence is obvious.
In #5 the religious tension is replaced by the purely secular enthusiasm of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club fans, screaming wildly behind the new coach and his team’s loquacious PR man. The woman interviewer (“a journalist and poet”) earnestly asks the  English speaking coach team questions but he is continually drowned out by the PR man’s bulldozing enthusiasm. And lies: “I hate humus!” “It’s so typically Israeli,” the coach observes, “I can’t say a word.” When the scene closes on his long, silent left-screen pensiveness, he shows the same rueful marginalization and impotence the women in #1, #6 and the finale show.
At 21:18 episode #7 introduces the personal, emotional form of the city’s divisions. The blonde Gaby is saved from the security guard’s sexual harassment (“I want to get to know you”) when she spots her older woman friend Mali. She shows off her new, impossibly high-heeled shoes — bought to wear to bed. Gaby is locked into an illicit affair with a man she doesn’t love, hardly knows but can’t bring herself to escape. Like those other women and like the alien football coach, she ends the scene in a long, sad meditation over her troubled relationship. Romance and politics converge in her analogy: “It’s as if we were both secret agents in enemy territory.” 
Both arenas are redefined by religious tradition at 21:22 when a frocked Christian ranter replaces the security guard who’s moved in beside Gaby. The priest brushes her hair, then becomes the mad prophet. “If you don’t scream ‘Long live liberty’” with humility, with laughter, with love, then you’re not supporting liberty. He inveighs against those who scream it with contempt, rage, hate. He retells Jesus saving the adulteress from the crowd of sinners. “Only the truth will set us free,” his Jesus said rebelliously. 
This prophet runs on into another discreet episode, specifying different times, as if in recognition of the Christ story reccurring across time. Here Gitai draws on Pasolini’s realistic film presentation of the Gospel According to St Matthew. At 21:37 the priest is holding an open Bible. At 21:58 he describes Christ at Gethsemane, filled with sorrow at the continuing tragedy of the willing spirit and the weak flesh. He closes on the consignment of all sinners to “the second death,” to eternal Hell. The scene closes ambiguously on “And he showed the holy city of Jerusalem.” Is the modern Jerusalem the holy or the hellish?
In #10, at 23:40, the French tourist reads to his son one answer, Flaubert’s report on his own disenchanting visit. Flaubert is irreverent. Farting at the Holy Gate, even he is “upset at my ass’s Voltaireanism.” Flaubert finds Jerusalem a tomb of rotting religions, fake, propagandist, exploitative, its sects locked ironically in mutual hatred. “We did see hyocrisy, greed…but no fucking trace of holiness.” Deprived of his expected pleasures of either religious excitement or hatred of the priests, Flaubert feels “emptier than a barrel.”  While his father recites Flaubert’s cynicism the son plays on the car’s supporting bars.  
A sadder, funnier parental relationship follows, at 23:12. A mother berates her divorced, loser son for having failed to provide a grandchild. She recalls the squinting nerd schoolboy Aaron Goldman.who used to wear a key on his neck because of bis neglectful mother. Now he’s blossomed into a neurosurgeon with two beautiful daughters. Our heroine is indignant at her own unrewarded sacrifice. 
Gitai centers the camera on her, with her failure son marginalized on the left. To the right is a yeshiva man who can’t touch her or accept a piece of her apple because he’s a bachelor. He feels commanded to ignore the world around him: “Study as you travel.” The woman advises that if a man prays at the Kottle (Wailing Wall) for 40 consecutive days “They will provide him with a woman.” An unseen man across the aisle fell in love with a gentile woman, who converted for him but then grew so religious that he was not Jewish enough for her.  
A parallel relationship follows, at 4:54. Waiting for the tram to take him back to his unit, a young soldier is kept out of focus on the right as he sings, dances and cavorts for his girlfriend. She occupies the left foreground like the solitary women in #1,6 and the end. He plays her “Dark Eyes” (Orchy chornya) on the harmonica, still in soft focus as if viewed through her suppressed tears.  When he says he doesn’t want her to stop living in his absence, to see his friend Moti, she reveals she has already invited Moti to date her in his absence. He has a car. Also another friend, a tall disc jockey. Her beau’s “Have fun” turns bleak. 
The sexual tension thickens in #13, at 5:16. An Israeli woman is paranoid at the perceived threat of an Arab man bringing on the tram  — paradoxically — palm branches. At her aggressive suspicions, the dangerous security guard confronts him, demands his ID, then throws him to the ground and calls for support. The scene closes on the woman’s frightened, aloof face, right screen, looking away.  
Episode 14 implies some context for that paranoia. A theatrical couple get on, with prop cat and dog playing at conflict. The man reveals that when he worked for Jews, he greeted every order with “Inshallah” — “God willing.” While the Jews took that as assent, he meant it as “No.” As a restaurant dishwasher, he had an affair with the 60-year-old woman owner.  Then he got a job as a newspaper reporter from Gaza, dodging snipers form both sides. The end of the war still left a senseless situation, so he turned to interviewing models. 
At 21:03 this politics intensifies. A TV talk show host is recognized by a couple at the station. On the train he previews his upcoming show, by reading a 1917 Trotsky tract calling for a permanent revolution against the injustices of capitalism. 
In contrast, at 20:12 — the carefully calibrated time scheme skips a day here, i.e., is meaningless, a pretence to passively recording an uncreated reality — two women meet over sharing a light in the station. One is an ascetic, mixed nationality Jewish blonde, the other an earthier, fuller lipped, dark beauty. They bond over their resistance to power, whether in their men or against the security guard who probes their IDs. “Considering what this country is turning into,” he says, “I wonder at you two together.” But that’s nothing political. 
As if to embody the women’s danger, at 22:02 a woman on the left side of the screen is forcibly confronted by her ex-lover, the brutish security guard. She leaves with “What I loved about you was your smell.” His scene-end meditation on that left edge has a tense, dangerous tone quite opposite to the matching women’s. 
The next episode is a quiet interlude. A caesura. From the tram’s front perspective, at 23:07 the train arrives at a station. The pause in the human dramas simply re-establishes the setting. It expresses the train’s single direction, in contrast to its conflicted passengers’. That also spans a considerable lapse of time. For at 18:45 a Palestinian rapper resumes the political argument: “How strong are you without a gun?…Palestine is not a land. Palestine lives within us… Who are you, crazy Israel?”  The Israeli passengers read on, unperturbed. We’re told specific times for each scene but not how many days elapse. That’s how the poetic event transcends the historic, happening not just once but over and again.
At 9 a.m. a fiddler performs in front of a Jewish couple. This parallels the harmonious banjoist in #2. But the romantic potential is quickly dispelled. Moshe and Didi broach divorce. Her “constant hostility ruins [his] appetite.” She cites his sterility and reluctance to adopt. He doesn’t want to raise a child in the crazy, dangerous country. He can’t forgive her for sleeping with his best friend five years ago when she thought he’d been hit by a missile. “We’re going different ways.”
  In contrast, an apparently harmonious couple meet the French tourist father at 14:50, and discuss his impressions of Israel. The couple extoll the miracle of their “small and fantastic people,” especially the heroism and democracy of their military. But Mr. Chelsea keeps praising the sun and the sand, the tourist face of the place. Finally Mrs Azoulay confronts him: “What do you have against our army?” He flees to his son. 
From that contrast between the Israeli tourist face and its existential survival, the film ends on two women’s performances. Before the closing Arabic singer, a wildly tressed redhead recites a German poem reaffirming humanity in the face of its threat. “There’s a weeping in the world, as at the saviour’s death. Let’s huddle together.” “When we look at each other our eyes blossom. We’re astounded by our own miracle…. I believe we are angels.” This poem attempts to bridge the abysses between the people we’ve met here, whether as lovers or as political opponents. That is clearly the director’s intention, in traversing the troubled landscape with characters trapped in the turmoil. 
One end credit cites the sources: Flaubert, Pasolini, Deuteronomy, Else Lasher-Schuler’s poem of the Apocalypse, and Israeli writers Asaf Tsipor, Sayed Kashua and Yohosaghua Kenaz, an appropriate mix of Arab and Jewish voices — like the film’s framework of songs.  Gitai confirms his status as a leading creative voice on Israel's endangered species Left.
 

 

Friday, July 12, 2019

The Dead Don't Die

Tilda Swinton plays the new funeral home director,  a dab hand with a samurai sword and an other-worldly (even more than Scottish?) presence. What could possibly go straight?
With the three young travelers’  “hipster irony,” Jim Jarmusch exercises the zombie genre conventions on both the topical and archetypal levels, i.e., the today and the eternal. They converge in Tom Waites’ bushman. 
Topically, Hermit Bob is the outsider who has removed himself from normal society, foraging in the wilds. He is disgusted with the materialism and falseness of the current ”fucked-up world” (his last word on the subject). 
The film’s first word on that currency is Farmer Frank’s (Steve Buscemi) “Make America White Again” red cap — the MAGA message exposed. He wears that racism despite his friendliness towards the town’s black man Hank (Danny Glover). Farmer Frank does catch himself for declaring his coffee “too black.” He flaunts the blatant racism while correcting the minor, inadvertent one. Remember when we thought American racism was dead?
In other contemporary reflections, the zombies stumble through the streets, fixated on their cell-phones,” muttering “Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi.” Ziggy Pop incants “Coffee! Coffee! Coffee!” even as he carries a half-full pot, undrunk.  
In the archetypal scheme Hermit Bob is the Biblical prophet, a self-exiled moralist who rails against the corruption of the age. Indeed the film’s theme song is a country colloquial affirmation of the Christian eternal promise: “After life is over the afterlife goes on.” 
The supernatural film genres have always been a dark parody of mainstream religion. Belief in a saviour allows for mobilizing a devil. Before the Commies infiltrated the culture, Jesus was the first of the great body-snatchers. But where Christianity promises a non-material afterlife, a being of spiritual radiance returned to divine roots, the zombies are the cursed antithesis, rotting flesh with insatiable hunger. Their eternity is an agony — which truly is better to give than to receive.
This film makes no reference to normal religion: no pastors, no prayers, no church. Instead, Centerville (“A nice place to visit”)  is vapid, as boring as decency, secular, free from religious sectarianism. Into that vacuum steps the pop culture society of horror freaks. Hick merchant Bobby Wiggins searches for meaning in pulp fiction and in the platitudes delivered by the UPS parody — e.g., “The world is perfect. Appreciate the details.”
The film’s crowning irony is its formal self-awareness. It foregrounds its artifice. Cop Ronnie (Adam Driver) tells Sheriff Cliff (Bill Murray) that the title song seems familiar because it’s the film’s theme.  How does he know “This is definitely going to end badly?” Director Jim showed him the whole script (not just his own scenes, as Bill’s Cliff was given, despite all he’s done for him).  
Hence the film’s blurring of  the usual distinctions between life and fiction. The name of the funeral home director evokes the Zelda (Fitzgerald) said to have been married to Gatsby (Fitzgerald’s husband F. Scott’s literary creation).  Centerville itself derives from the town in Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels. The three hip tourists drive the very same Pontiac LeMans model that opens George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Ronnie infers they must hail from Romero’s Pittsburgh, overlooking their Ohio plates. A tombstone for director Samuel Fuller is prominent in the graveyard. As the two lead characters know they are living a script, the film openly admits to being but a performed story. Here lives are roles. 
There again the film walks the two lines at once. Archetypally, we make our life choices with the assumption of free will but aware of restraints and impulses from some beyond. And topically, Americans discover themselves assailed by a nightmarish evil assumed to have been dead and buried forever, now unstoppable save for the removal of “the head.” Though Cliff and Ronnie know they will end badly, they — with American film genre valour — determine to fight to the end.    
Ronnie has an all-American basis for his smooth decapitating sword swing. He “played some minor league ball …. Well, a little Class A, it was a long time ago.” Zelda’s is due not so much to her Scottish origin as from her coming from even further outer space.            But unlike Bobby’s and Ronnie’s faith in the reality of zombie fiction, Zelda knows the truth about Star Wars: “That’s good fiction.” 
But is it just fiction? Ronnie actor Adam Driver knows his Star Wars scripts too, from having acted them. He’s lived there. Anyway, the reality of science fiction enables Zelda to depart our planet safely. 
     The only earthly survivors are the three young teens from the detention center. Their saving grace? They are young, clever, harmonious — and woke enough for the boy Geronimo to keep breaking the center’s laws to reunite innocently with his girl friends. An open humanity trumps the rules whether religious or institutional.

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Good Morning, Son

As in his debut feature, Heder (Room 514) writer-director Sharon Bar-Ziv explores the consequences of a single atrocity to reaffirm the need for Israel’s humanity in war. 
A mishandled Gaza operation leaves young Omri in a coma. His parents, sister, friends, comrades, struggle to stimulate him back into consciousness. Wars leave shells of humanity.
At the same time the awake relationships quiver and shift. The parents quarrel. Sis and mom yell at each other. A mate is dating Omri’s unrequited passion. The parents grow impatient with the dedicated hospital staff.
This is an outside-the-soldier version of Johnny Got His Gun, where the insanity of war is summarized in one man’s paralysis, his sentience silenced.
In the saddest scene the grieving parents of his friend, killed in the same operation, swallow their tragic loss and bring Omri a photo of the two boys frolicking in a pool.
Typically, the Israeli soldiers bring the liveliest, sassiest spirit to their visits. Aptly, the l’chaim of a Rosh Hashannah dinner at his bedside prompts Omri’s breakthrough — his own l’chaim (translated here as “Cheers’ but of course meaning “to life”).The film is a profoundly felt reaffirmation of life in the face of war.
      In a fatuous pro forma remark, the mayor asserts that the enemy is also suffering. That doesn’t assuage the grief of Omri’s family, nor justify the decades of war — nor the culture in which older sister Hagar, offered her choice of toy at Omri’s birth, insisted upon a big gun. 

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Yesterday

So it’s not just the Beatles that have been forgotten in this alternative universe. Coca Cola, Oasis, cigarettes, Harry Potter and Jane Austen have been too. John Lennon casually refers to “prejudice and pride” as if he’d never heard the famous title. 
Ah, yes, the evanescence of human achievement, where even man’s greatest accomplishments can disappear without a trace. Call this the musical version of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Of course, with worldly glory so insubstantial and fleeting all that matters is true love. All you need is love, as heroes Jack and Ellie finally discover. Could be a song there.
A familiar theme does not a failure make. Indeed Danny Boyle’s new film is his most satisfying since Trainspotting (1996!), albeit in a tad different key. The idea that the Beatles could disappear from all but three peoples’ memory is intriguing. It reminds us how tentative our apprehension of any reality really is. 
The film is also a well-earned homage to that quartet. As another “memory” puts it: The world would be a far poorer place without the Beatles music so any revival, under whatever terms, is a blessing. That value goes for art in general — the imaginative fabrications that enrich us, our world, out lives. Everything is enhanced by our imagination, the ability to apprehend what never existed — or what did but has been lost. 
     That also reflects on the love story. Jack as kept Ellie in the wrong column all these years because he has failed to imagine her as a lover, them as a couple. His ethnic distinction makes that instinct of self-denial all the more understandable. The happy ending gives him all his beloved — the woman he married and the music he has managed to selflessly donate to the world, no financial strings attached. The school gym performance is more satisfying than Wembley.   

The Fig Tree

We read of the problems Ethiopian Jewish refugees face in Israel. This powerful, poignant love story limns the problems that require that refuge and encourage them to make that risky sacrifice. 
  There are few signs of Judaism in this film: the Hebrew on Mina’s T-shirt, a chain, the memory of a rabbi ancestor, the eternal drive to the homeland. The dominant religious emblem is the friend’s ceremonial robe with cross. 
The titular fig tree is redolent of Biblical associations, perhaps primarily of fertility in the desert. But here it’s an ambivalent symbol. It’s where 16-year-old Jewish Mina meets her Christian boyfriend Eli, who hides there from the troops determined to kidnap him into the civil war. The virgin lovers frolic around its twisted, arid limbs. It’s also where they find the legless war veteran, determined to kill himself. They manage to prolong his agony, aka life.
Mina’s brother is home from the war, short one hand. She massages his stump to restore life. 
The Jewishness that pervades the film is the overall compassion for the refugee, of whatever nation, whatever need, here centered on its compelling source. In a more personal form of that emotion, Mina tries to sacrifice her own salvation to save her Christian lover.
       Writer-director Aalam-Warqe Davidian based her script on her own childhood experiences in the civil war there. We can tell.

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Echo

The tunnel may be an obvious metaphor in Amikam Kovner’s family tragedy, but it works —and even finds new twists of sunken meaning.
As tunnel engineer Avner’s marriage explodes he discovers the subterranean issues that separated his wife Ella from him. He’s been so preoccupied with error-free construction at work that he misses his psychiatrist wife’s problems with her professional depths. 
She feels guilty for having failed to prevent a client’s suicide. She slips into an affair with a young lawyer, drawn by his professional compassion for the victim’s demented mother. But Ella can’t leave Avner. Until she feels she can’t stay. 
Tunneller weds shrink. Beneath all those placid surfaces expect seismic rumbles. 
Avner’s stoic manliness is especially pointed in the Israeli context. Brisk, efficient, indomitable — Avner is the competent idealistic sabra. His own marital wound turns him against his basketball mate’s affairs with married women. 
But strength is no longer enough. As he remembers his last message from Ella, Avner’s perfectionism proves his fatal weakness when he holds himself above forgiveness. He refuses to allow his partners weakness in the tunnel, so by extension in the marriage. That provides the tunnel film’s title. Avner’s hollow rigidity — in the name of security — echoes across to Ella, driving her to death and him to ruin.
There’s yet another spin to these urban Israeli tunnels. As Israel remains under constant existential threat, Hamas in Gaza and Hezboillah in Lebanon have been building invasive tunnels into Israel with the avowed intention of abducting and murdering Jewish civilians. Taken together, the Israeli controlled tunnels she builds and the enemy tunnels she has to defend against call for a vigilant perfectionism, for very basic stability and for a grounding that is national as well as personal. The danger is, as Avner painfully learns, that the defensive strength it requires may diminish the survivor’s humanity. 

Souvenir

Subtlely, the incongruent last shot recasts the entire film we’ve just watched. With a swirl of flamboyant flare slacks, heroine Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) walks out through the monstrous steel doors of a sound stage. The landscape outside is the bush-punctuated horizon we saw earlier, over which Julie read the letters that marked the dissolution of her affair with Anthony (Tom Burke). 
The soundstage identifies the major feature film we’ve just been watching, not the film school student projects that have been interwoven with the Julie-Anthony relationship. Those were bitsy pieces including a scene from Measure for Measure.  That is, the film we’ve been watching is a film being made, a narrative being imagined/remembered, not the usual putative elapsing of a life’s events. This is meta-cinema.
Julie’s flashy pants and confident stride here quite depart from her timorous bearing through the narrative. Expanding her tentativeness, while the other characters worked off Joanna Hogg’s memoir script, Honor Swinton Byrne extemporized her lines, drawing on Hogg’s journals, scripts, photos and letters from the late ‘70s, when these events happened to her. She is creating her character on the fly. Hence this narrative feels largely unscripted. Author/director Hogg draws a two-feature narrative (the second half is in the works) out of her memories of student days and her first love affair. 
In another fiction/life continuum, the West Raynham Film School is named after the air base hangar where the sets were built and the film shot. 
So, too, the self-reflexive title. This Souvenir is a souvenir of another Souvenir, the 18th Century Fragonard painting of a lovelorn woman carving her absent/lost lover’s initials into a tree. This work intrigues Julie; Anthony sends her a postcard version. Our film is her record, her carving, of her lost lover’s name and their passion into the immortality of art, this time the film. 
In addition to being the director’s memoir, the film is a clear meditation on the function of art, especially film, especially in the cultural moment of its setting. The late ‘70s evokes the culture’s romantic revolution against traditional British torpor and stiffness. 
Both sets of parents —Anthony’s and Julie’s — embody the bloodlessness of the British upper middle class. Julie’s live in a luxurious estate and fund her posh London flat where a garish bedstead and doubled bed accommodate her first affair. Mother Rosalind (Honor’s mother Tilda Swinton) steadily “lends” Julie the money she needs to support Anthony, under the guise of funding her student film.  
      Anthony’s parents live on a more modest rural estate, appropriate for an undistinguished photographer whose interest in the Sunderland shipyards lies in the beautiful shapes of the ships not in the workers’ beleaguered lives. Only Anthony’s disintegration punctures the period’s pallid aestheticizing of suffering.     
As Julie’s film profs tell her, she should be drawing her art out of her life. Intending to escape her privileged Knightsbridge “bubble,” she plans to tell a grittier Sunderland story. She would focus on a little boy helplessly dependent upon his mother, terrified at losing her — and then she dies. Julie’s affair — that drives this film — lives out that plot or dynamic.  Julie becomes utterly dependent upon the initially iimpressive but doomed Anthony, who dies. Thus she lives the story that she initially intended only to tell. 
Paradoxically,  Julie must first assume the mother’s function, when she has to support the weak man. Anthony, implausibly claiming to work for the Foreign Office, then to have connections to the Courtauld, initially treats Julie to upper-class London dining but then proves financially dependent upon her — at the same excessively posh places. His financial dependency feeds her emotional dependency, until he dies, freeing her to make her/this movie.
Anthony’s black director friend provides another critique of the period cultural war. In his leopard skin costume and with his big-hair brassy blonde partner he is the liberated colonial. He disdains the film school teachers and appreciates the school only for the opportunity it gave him to steal what he needed to make his film.     
      Curiously, his set-piece argument is that Britain has never made a musical feature film. He reels off the contemporary hit groups — the Stones, the Kinks. etc. — but notably omits the Beatles. This omission points to the larger gap in his argument: Britain indeed did produce several musical features, ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Waltzes from Vienna (1933), the George Formby vehicles, indeed the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! ((1965) and Yellow Submarine (1968), John Boorman’s  Catch Us If You Can, with the Dave Clark Five (1965), inter alia. The man's firm assertion is wrong, the expression of an ungrounded authority, a fraud in his film history as in his filmmaking.   
      Yet that man has an immediate insight into the Julie-Anthony relationship. He knows what she, for all their intimacy, doesn’t — that Anthony is a heroin addict — and he infers the lovers’ incompatibility.  But the chap is still wrong. Anthony may not be the right man for Julie’s love life. But he’s the right challenge to launch her artistry, giving her a personal engagement with the story she determined to tell. He breaks her bubble.