Producers: Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Emma Norton and Luke Schiller Director: Joanna Hogg Screenplay: Joanna Hogg Cast: Honor Swinton Byrne, Jaygann Ayeh, Richard Ayoade, Ariane Labed, Tilda Swinton, James Spencer Ashworth, Charlie Heaton, Harris Dickinson, Joe Alwyn, Gail Ferguson, Jack McMullen and Frankie Wilson Distributor: A24 Films
Grade: C-
Two years ago, Joanna Hogg released “The Souvenir,” a semi-autobiographical tale about film student Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne) and her fraught relationship with Anthony (Tom Burke), a charismatic but manipulative drug addict expert in chicanery. Now she follows that probing, perplexing study of a toxic romance with a sequel about how Julie deals with its tragic aftermath. Making it might have had a cathartic effect for the filmmaker, but the result could have a soporific one on the viewer: the removal of Burke’s flamboyant Anthony from the scene leaves Julia adrift, and sadly the narrative as well.
The film isn’t so much a sequel as a continuation, with Julie working through her grief and trying to understand the doomed relationship in which she’d invested so much. A short but powerful sequence shows her visiting Anthony’s devastated parents, who are understandably crushed by the revelations about the son they thought they’d known. She visits a therapist (Gail Ferguson) who matter-of-factly offers some abstruse observations about her trauma.
Julie is fortunate in that her parents, Rosalind (Tilda Swinton) and William (James Spencer Ashworth), are wealthy and endlessly supportive, not only giving her shelter in their rambling home until she’s ready to go back to her apartment but funding her return to film school to finish her thesis film. That turns out to be quite different from the kitchen-sink working class narrative she’d proposed to a dubious faculty committee in the first “Souvenir.” She now intends to make a semi-autobiographical work in which Garance (Ariane Labed) and Pete (Harris Dickinson), surrogates for her and Anthony, will mimic their impassioned but destructive life together. She even recreates the apartment they shared on set in a bid for absolute verisimilitude.
The project is clearly intended to serve as part of her personal journey of coming to terms with her past, but she seems unable to impose a stable vision on the shoot: her voluble producer Marland (Jaygann Ayeh) questions her casting choices, the stars variously criticize her for a lack of direction and rejecting their interpretations of the characters, and members of the crew complain that she’s not even providing production schedules or lists of planned shots.
Her reaction to all this seems frankly passive, mostly nods and feeble gestures of agreement or indecision. One supposes that we’re meant to intuit that despite appearances she’s gradually developing her artistic voice inside, but in order for that strategy to work, Hogg would herself have needed to cast someone other than Swinton Byrne, who evinces little of her mother’s skill at showing layers within a character (see here, for instance, her reaction to Julie breaking a prized bowl). There are actors who can disclose a character’s inner life with but a glance, not needing reams of dialogue about it; but Swinton Byrne is not among them.
And when Julie’s thesis film premieres, with her parents in attendance, it turns out to be nothing like the film we’ve watched her shooting. It’s a pretentious, ultra-arty farrago of allusions to other movies and dreamlike references to her unhappy experience with Anthony. Yet it’s received rapturously by the audience, including her hitherto skeptical teachers. The entire sequence will probably bewilder many viewers, but presumably this version of the thesis film is meant to represent the lacerating self-examination Julie imagines her work to represent, as the stage-bound final shot of the resultant after-party suggests. To at least one viewer, though, the closest comparison would be to the final scene of Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” where the premiere of “Plan Nine from Outer Space” is perceived in its director’s mind as an enormous success. Chuckling over the awfulness of Julie’s opus, rather than lauding its supposedly revelatory power, might be the proper reaction.
If Julie’s artistic ambitions end up feeling unfulfilled, her personal life remains in limbo as well. She goes to bed with Jim (Charlie Heaton), the star of another student’s film, but it’s a dreary one-night stand that leads nowhere. And when she thinks that a kindly editor (Joe Alwyn) might be coming on to her, she’s taken aback when he informs her he has a boyfriend. It appears that she hasn’t really escaped Anthony, and his use of the titular Fragonard painting as a means of instruction—and control.
That last sequence, though—along with the absurd one on Julie’s thesis film—does, however, point to one of the strengths of “The Souvenir Part II”—a sense of humor mingled with the seriousness. It’s most clear in the depiction of the student films, not merely that of Julie but those of her classmates. The most notable example involves Patrick (Richard Ayoade), a holdover from the first installment—a pompous would-be auteur who compares himself to Welles and Scorsese and takes even compliments about the dreadful musical he’s making as an insult top his artistry, if they’re not effusive enough. His preening self-regard is so obnoxious that in the end he’s banned from the post-production process on his own picture. Ayoade is so funny in the role that one might be tempted to suggest that he might have been the focus of a feature himself; but he’d be as unendurable to an audience for two hours as Patrick is shown as having been to his crew for their shoot.
The other supporting actors here are fine too, with Swinton particularly penetrating as Julie’s concerned but, in the British fashion, undemonstrative mother and Ashworth nicely laid-back as her father. The technical crew—cinematographer David Raedeker, production designer Stéphane Collonge, costumer Grace Snell, sound designer Jovan Ajder and editor Helle Le Fevre—also give yeoman service to realizing Hogg’s very personal vision.
But in the end “The Souvenir Part II” suffers the fate of most sequels, being decisively inferior to its predecessor.