Joanna Hogg Talks ‘The Souvenir Part II,’ Meta Experiences, Reflective Catharthis & More [Interview]

Director Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir: Part II” is a luminous, layered piece of work about recollection, remembrance, and memory. It’s also an exploratory meta-experience about filmmaking and the act of evoking an experience and a feeling. Obviously, the second part to her first film— “The Souvenir,” a hit at Sundance in 2019— ‘Part II’ continues the story of Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), the surrogate for Hogg in a semi-autobiographical account of her experiences at film school in London in the 1980s. The simplest way to explain the two films, if you haven’t seen them, is that they are about a relationship that ends in tragedy (‘Part I’) and the aftermath (‘Part II’), in which the still-grieving, self-doubting, still-anguished film school student tries to work through her pain through art, in an autobiographic film (within the film), about what happened to her in ‘Part I.’ Got that?

READ MORE: Fall 2021 Movie Preview: 60+ Must-See Films

“The Souvenir Part II” is thus a kind of introspective, refracting broken mirror of memory. Hogg, making a film about a relationship and a personal tragedy that she underwent herself—based on lies and deceit— and then creating a character who lives it, and then tries to film it, while Hogg herself is recreating recreations. The movie is a bit head-spinning in theory, but it’s just a profoundly layered story that’s quite affecting, subtle, emotionally textured, ambitious, and deeply alluring.

In his Playlist review from Cannes, Carlos Aguilar described the film as “about the miracle of moviemaking and how improbable it is for a director to achieve even a semblance of honest self-expression, let alone do so with marvelous subtly as Hogg has done more than once.”

Returning from the first film, “The Souvenir Part II” again features Tilda Swinton (Honor Swinton Bryne’s real-life mother, playing her mother), Richard Ayoade, Ariane Labed, Jaygann Ayeh, and a few new faces, including Charlie Heaton, Joe Alwyn, and Harris Dickinson (who stood in for Robert Pattinson who had to drop out of the film before shooting began). It’s a film that hard to describe beyond its fundamental ideas of memorializing a seminal moment in time and its meta-qualities, just as it’s far beyond just a movie about grief, working-through trauma, and reminiscence. Perhaps coming of age is just the best bucket for it, a dense, complicated, coated, and sumptuous coming-of-age film as there has ever been. A few weeks before the film’s release, I spoke to Hogg about catharsis, grief, filmmaking; Martin Scorsese, who exec-produced the two films, helping them get greenlit, and her uniquely “alive” process. And if you want to dive in deeper, here’s our review of ‘Part I’ and our interview with Joanna Hogg about the first film.

I just rewatched the film again, and I started thinking about catharsis, especially when making a two-part film about a seminal event of your life.  Is catharsis even attainable when exploring something like this decades later?
Yeah, I know, it’s a good question. I think I thought out the potential for catharsis when I started writing it. But ultimately, it wasn’t as simple as that for me. The process of looking back brought up a lot of things—not necessarily nice things. So one has a kind of grieving in the process as well. So someone could say that’s something cathartic, but sitting here now talking to you, I don’t feel a sense of relief having created this work.

 But maybe, what happens is—I went from ‘Souvenir Part One’ to ‘Part Two,’ and now I’m working on a new further film, not related to the ‘Souvenir,’ and I don’t have that… maybe, it’s because I’m not analyzing it a lot. There isn’t time to look up at what I’m doing, but there’s a lot that I’m learning. But I’m not sure that answers your questions.

It’s interesting because there’s a tension in this remembrance, this recollection, with filmmaking so utterly precise and vivid, but a mood of all of it that feels like sharing an impression. And maybe, in that sense, that’s not seeking catharsis.
Well, I think interestingly, the goal with this particular story was—even back to a few years after I had the particular experience with a relationship like this—I thought, ‘I’ve been through something, there’s something here, there’s a good story in a way.’ So, I thought about it like a storyteller or a novelist, ‘There is something here that’s worth trying to express.’ So, there was no personal goal other than wanting to tell and communicate the experience. And I just thought, ‘okay, some of my ideas, or my previous films, haven’t had this kind of clear storyline, but this didn’t somehow, even if I was still living through it and still processing.

I didn’t speak to you for the first film, but I’ve got to assume it was always conceived as two parts—one being the relationship itself, two being the aftermath? That basic construction?
Since 1988 it’s been that way; when I first thought about making a film about this story, it had that shape. It was in two parts in that way, one story, but that same split.

So tell me about the exploration of the second part, the aftermath, because it’s loaded with much more than just grief for the death of her partner and the death of that relationship.
Well, I made up a lot when I’m made the second part; it’s not so much based in fact or truth. Even the first part is only loosely based on my experience, to be honest.

Anyway, I had a chance to tell the response to the story differently, which wasn’t connected directly to what I’d been through myself. In a way, it’s a film about the making of ‘Part One’ because it was quite an experience for me to reconstruct, psychically and literally, my life at that point in time. And so my reactions to when the set of my [apartment] was being constructed, with people based on my life at that time, or literal objects or bits furniture that was exact, was, that strange thing of having something constructed out of one’s life. I found that fascinating as a story in itself.

So, that kind of reflection, that part two is of ‘Part One,’ was exciting. It was alive, very immediate, very contemporary. It wasn’t the looking back in the way that ‘Part One’ had been. Of course, that’s only one facet of it because it’s impossible to express every facet. After all, it was such a complex jigsaw puzzle of different elements going on in part two. But that was definitely one aspect that was like an ink print, placing it on top of a black piece of paper and then the impression it makes.