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.