The Souvenir Part II Review: A Tribute to Art As a Necessary Component of Life

One of the strengths of The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg’s devastating semi-autobiographical reflection on the emotional toll of living with a duplicitous partner struggling with addiction, is the quiet way in which the British filmmaker’s outwardly meek protagonist and alter ego finds her resilience. Hogg always planned for the film to have a sequel, and for it to concern the mending of a heart rent by pain. But while The Souvenir Part II is as delicately observed and thoroughly enrapturing as its predecessor, it’s also about how people come to understand themselves through the things they make.

The Souvenir Part II seemingly starts only moments after the events of the first film. But there’s no cliffhanger to resolve, no obvious line of action to be picked up and followed through on. We join Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne) in bed at her parents’ house in Norfolk, recuperating from her traumatic first years in film school. Her mother and father (Tilda Swinton and James Spencer Ashworth) support her, but they do so from an emotional distance that’s distinctive of wealthy British families. “Did you know what was going on with the chap?” her father asks, a somewhat indirect way of ascertaining whether she knew that her boyfriend of two years, Anthony, was a heroin addict heading toward a fatal overdose.

This domestic atmosphere that puts individual privacy before familial intimacy may have something to do with the way Julie remained ignorant of Anthony’s habit. Julie first tries to reconstruct the life he had kept hidden from her throughout their relationship, visiting his parents and old haunts, only to become something of a curio to people who know what happened to Anthony. How could she not have known what was going on? But that’s a question that’s never asked by those around her. It only lingers in her face and eyes.

Julie implicitly goes about answering that question not as a matter of survivor’s guilt, but of self-discovery. She adapts the experience of her time with Anthony into a script for her thesis film, which in an excruciating scene is soundly rejected for support by her (all-male) committee for being too fantastical and abstract. Borrowing money from her parents, she pursues the project anyway, casting Garance (Ariane Labed)—a fellow directing student whom she admires—as herself and a local stage actor, Pete (Harris Dickinson), as Anthony.

It’s though her interactions with these two individuals that Julie relives the most painful experiences of her past, namely as she struggles to give them a firm grasp of her and Anthony’s states of mind. “It feels like your idea of him, rather than the reality,” Pete tells her at one point, to which Julie averts her gaze and tries to stammer out a response.

Perhaps the most affecting aspect of Hogg’s film is the way that Julie gains confidence in her abilities and vision as a director. Her completed thesis project, titled The Souvenir, ends up grafted directly into The Souvenir Part II itself, presented as its dreamy art-film double, though what we see on screen is completely different from what we watched Julie and her crew shoot up to this point. It’s an extended passage into the movie-world of the main character’s mind that resembles a similarly situated scene in Singin’ in the Rain, a film that fascinated Hogg from a very young age. This extended lapse into meta-cinematic fantasy completes the gradual crescendo in the mood of The Souvenir duology, and the eponymous film-within-the-film gives us a climactic glimpse into our hero’s often elusive interior.

As in The Souvenir, David Raedeker’s cinematography distinguishes itself in its use of pale light and washed-out tones that can make the film’s precise compositions look almost like aged storybook illustrations, particularly on a couple of occasions when Hogg bridges scenes using simple montages of close-ups on flowers in the field near Julie’s parents’ pastoral home. There’s a purely decorative appeal to these images, like designs you might find framing the image on a book cover, but they also invoke an awakening after a storm. That Hogg can deploy such imagery without it feeling too heavy-handed speaks to her control of pacing and mise-en-scène, her fluid interweaving of story and meta-story, of literal and symbolic images.

Much of The Souvenir: Part II follows Julie as she goes about making her thesis film, which is being produced by her friend and main advocate within the student body, Marland (Jaygann Ayeh). Julie’s emotional recuperation takes place largely on movie sets and on the black-and-white monitors through which she oversees her film’s making. Throughout, Hogg captures not only the intense labor and tension between various craftspeople’s visions on a movie set, but also the intangible exchanges between thought and representation, reality and fiction, that shape the production of such a profoundly personal work of art. But the filmmaker’s exploration of these permeable abstract boundaries doesn’t lapse into self-indulgence, as Julie’s attempts to re-formulate the elements of her trauma into honest artwork are presented with an almost paradoxical alchemy of intellectual flair and formal reserve.

Julie’s project is produced in parallel to the garishly pretentious musical being made by her classmate, Patrick (Richard Ayoade). Principally (though not solely) through him, The Souvenir Part II opens up to the dry humor that was nascent in the first film. Like Julie’s exceedingly prim parents, Patrick is just shy of a caricature. His temper tantrums over the ineffable particularities of his magnum opus, though comically excessive, feel well within the realm of real-world film-student behavior. Venturing so close to open parody is a risky move on Hogg’s part, but the heightened comic quality of these supporting characters suits the complex self-reflexivity of The Souvenir Part II, with its constant invitations to its audience to view and think about it as a means by which the author is reconciling herself with her past.

In the end, Julie’s graduation project, assembled from her memories of the events depicted in The Souvenir, hardly seems more fully formed than Patrick’s scattershot musical, but its roots in her experiences give it an undeniable life that his project lacks. A film of understated warmth, profound emotional complexity, and eminently British dry humor, The Souvenir Part II is a vital tribute to art as a necessary component of life.