‘The Souvenir Part II’: Film Review

Filmmaking is an act of therapeutic and reinvention in The Memento Half II, Joanna Hogg’s cool-headed but roiling continuation of her 2019 characteristic a couple of younger girl drawn into a dangerous relationship with a caddish charmer. The distinctive British filmmaker is on the peak of her powers on this semiautobiographical work. It’s not a lot a sequel as a cathartic exploration wherein her display alter ego, performed in one other efficiency of startling emotional candor by Honor Swinton Byrne, picks aside the wreckage of her romance within the wake of tragedy and reassembles the items.

Arguably much more authentic and intensely private than the primary half, this A24 launch deftly extracts one thing actual and relatable from the frilly artifice of the filmmaking course of, making amusing observations about each the tutorial and the business sides.

It’s an unusually revealing account of a lady determining not solely who she desires to be, however storing up experiences, good and unhealthy, whereas regularly growing the language and maturity to show them into artwork. That Hogg does this with out ever having to apologize for the privilege of her higher middle-class white protagonist is a testomony to her wit and intelligence as a director, and to the unguarded vulnerability of Swinton Byrne’s efficiency.

The drama begins along with her character, Julie Harte, nonetheless numb from the shock of her boyfriend Anthony’s dying — that character was performed fantastically within the first movie by Tom Burke, his seductiveness brushed however not undone by his superiority — and from the revelations of his double life, retreating to the comforts of her well-off dad and mom’ house within the North Norfolk countryside.

Hogg habitually works from a primary remedy with little dialogue, shaping every scene along with her collaborators as capturing progresses. That improvisational high quality is very rewarding in scenes between Julie and Swinton Byrne’s real-life mom, Tilda Swinton, who’s caring however crisply reserved as Rosalind, torn between giving her daughter area and coddling her. And James Spencer Ashworth, a gentleman farmer from the realm with no display appearing expertise, performs her father, William, with pretty notes of heat behind his cheery platitudes. The observations of Englishness in these scenes are spot-on and filled with refined humor.

Julie’s dad and mom conceal their concern for her behind a barely self-absorbed politesse, amusingly so when her mom begins gushing enthusiastically concerning the Etruscan-style sugar bowl she’s made in a pottery class. “I’m going to fill this home with artifacts,” she exclaims, whereas William chimes in with phrases of encouragement. As well-meaning as they’re, that is clearly a pair for whom the fact of a heroin addict whose life was an intricate meeting of lies, as was Anthony’s, is just too international to ponder in a lot element. Solely when her mom visits Julie in her Knightsbridge residence does a few of that remoteness dissolve.

Nonetheless struggling to make sense of her relationship with Anthony, Julie returns to movie faculty to work on her commencement venture. The identical male school members who questioned the luxury scholar’s connection to a kitchen-sink drama set in economically blighted, working-class Sunderland in The Memento now elevate their eyebrows over her intention to scrap that concept and swap to an unstructured romantic fairy story.

The shoot, rippling with undercurrents of scholar rivalry, turns into Julie’s technique of working via her loss, and Swinton Byrne is at her finest in these scenes of isolation inside the group. She rejects the skilled actresses advised by her producing companion (Jaygann Ayeh) for her feminine lead, as an alternative casting fellow scholar Garance (Ariane Labed), a confident Frenchwoman whose personal sci-fi venture — clearly emulating the high-style French thrillers of the ’80s, wherein decade Hogg’s movie is ready — couldn’t be extra dissimilar. Julie consistently questions herself, and Garance’s problem understanding her position — she finds the character “too naïve, too fragile” — feeds her insecurities.

In a single highly effective scene, Julie’s indecisiveness causes tempers to flare in a van between setups. Her colleagues really feel adrift, however slightly than providing reassurances by taking cost, she withdraws into silence because the argument turns into extra heated. That’s to not say Julie is a passive character. She’s introverted, however her confidence grows by virtually imperceptible levels all through.

One other perspective on the artistic cauldron of moviemaking comes through a big-budget interval musical being shot by supercilious egomaniac Patrick (Richard Ayoade), a personality tantalizingly encountered within the first movie and right here given a a lot bigger sandbox wherein to play. Blithely evaluating himself to Scorsese (an govt producer on each the Memento movies) and Orson Welles, Patrick is at his most hilarious in a tense scene through the modifying course of, when each cautious praise winds him up the fallacious approach. “That’s marvelously generic,” he responds disparagingly to Julie’s phrases of reward. “You’re forcing me to have a tantrum.”

Maybe partly because of his grounding in demented Brit TV comedy like The IT Crowd and The Mighty Boosh, the priceless Ayoade has a knack for concurrently overplaying and underplaying. A scene the place a dejected Patrick skulks round Soho in a white fur after being shut out of postproduction (“I’m middling,” he responds acerbically, when Julie asks how he’s doing) is humorous, but additionally leaves a lingering pathos.

Julie, in the meantime, bounces amongst three new males as she struggles to determine whether or not she actually misses Anthony or simply the intimacy of companionship. She has a one-night stand with the star of Patrick’s musical (Charlie Heaton) that pins her self-worth round zero; she makes effortful makes an attempt to speak what she desires from the male lead in her personal movie (Harris Dickinson), a stand-in for the person she cherished however clearly didn’t perceive; and he or she fully misreads the indicators from her sympathetic homosexual editor (Joe Alwyn) in a single endearingly awkward second, superbly performed by each actors.

All these scenes add attention-grabbing layers to our understanding of her frame of mind, which then will get turned inside-out on the premiere of her commencement movie. As an alternative of the movie she’s been capturing, we see the surreal dream model in her head, which carries echoes of Anthony’s admiration for Powell and Pressburger, The Crimson Sneakers particularly. Anthony’s phrases to her, “You’re misplaced and can at all times be misplaced,” reverberate over theatrical photographs representing their time collectively, together with the weekend in Venice the place his dishonesty turned tougher to disregard.

This can be a ballsy stylistic shift at a climactic second within the story, however Hogg makes it work, including to the complexity with which she surveys Julie’s emergence from despondency and her blossoming confidence as an artist. There’s candy vindication, too, in her success after bending the foundations of movie faculty, a word that little doubt displays Hogg’s personal experiences from that point.

As within the first movie, the subtle contributions of DP David Raedeker and manufacturing designer Stéphane Collonge are indispensable in a movie that’s all about the best way our gaze is directed, each in films and in real-life expertise. The eye to element in Julie’s residence set, with painted flats seen via the home windows and picket help beams behind its fabricated partitions, is only one approach wherein Hogg deftly upends our perceptions of the road separating absolutely inhabited actuality from a filtered interpretation of it, laborious fought however well worth the struggle.