This Soft Machine
The sequel nobody was expecting, The Souvenir Part II looks back at Joanna Hogg’s first film while opening up the very concept of making art from intrinsically personal experience – specifically, grief. Exploring the extent to which the story translates for women filmmakers in the UK in real life, Emily Maskell speaks to several key voices of the film industry to better understand their work and Hogg’s new feature.
There are only a few days between where The Souvenir ends and The Souvenir Part II begins, yet it feels like a lifetime has passed for Julie. She’s wading through the trenches of grief in the wake of her disastrous relationship and the untimely death of the predatory and destructive Anthony.
The storm of her loss shows no signs of blowing over, but Julie’s desperate to get back on her feet, even if that means venturing out into the torrential rain. She begins replanting the roots she nurtured in The Souvenir, becoming a filmmaker who seeks out artistic authenticity, a desire lost in the murky depths of her tumultuous relationship. Emerging from the cocoon in her wealthy parents’ Norfolk estate, Julie begins pre-production on her looming graduate project.
The Souvenir Part II is Joanna Hogg’s metafictional memoir; a film about a filmmaker making a film about a filmmaker. The truth is laced with dramatic fantasy, amid a narrative spotlighting the creative process of a woman filmmaker. This reconstruction of reality is what divides the two parts of The Souvenir: while the first was an interior struggle, the second shifts into crafting a portrait of the relationship that tore her apart. This unravelling is told through Julie’s creative process of making her graduation short film, a project made in Anthony’s honour that gives her the space to grieve. Filmmaking simultaneously offers salvation and rebirth for a post-Anthony Julie. At one point, Hogg makes such a thought explicit: a Super 8 camera rises from the ground into Julie’s open palm as she mutters, “I am born again.”
This experience of finding a rejuvenated voice through the act of filmmaking hits home for many women filmmakers. In the case of writer-director Kirsty Robinson-Ward, like Julie, filmmaking has offered a means for self-processing and escapism. “I started writing a feature script when I was 14,” Robinson-Ward tells Massive. “I got into a dark place and my way of dealing with it was writing this film, Tea + Cake. It was such a huge part of me to get this film made. While working I was squirrelling away on this feature and by the end of it, for over half my life I had been working on this feature.”
Tea + Cake, released in 2015, centres on the intertwined lives of four women as they face the burdens of their unfolding realities. Robinson-Ward exhaustively gazed inwards during her process, coming of age as a woman and a filmmaker in the years it took to make the film. “I could never rest. The characters would never leave my head, it became an obsession… maybe in an unhealthy way,” she explains. The emotional mechanics of such a personal film blur the lines between reality and fiction, as they do for Julie. Where she ends and the filmic version of her begins becomes impossible to distinguish, her subjective truth feeling as factual as proven science. This tactile relationship between life and work is like a woven tapestry where each thread is intricately hand-sewn; for Robinson-Ward it involves meticulously stitching together interweaving characters but for Julie it’s about unpicking the threads of her and Anthony’s life together, shedding his grasp, needing to exorcise these emotions, memories and eventualities to tie her fraying ends.
Therein lies an element of catharsis of looking within for inspiration. “I look back and I realise I was trying to work out something and it took me writing it down to realise,” says Florence Winter-Hill of her 2019 film If You Go, a touching comedy-drama that captures the moment a mother tells her daughter about her breast cancer diagnosis as they sit in their broken-down car in the English countryside. The writer-director explains the majority of the film’s circumstances directly correlate to her own life. This self-portrait sees the extrapolation of the self as a way to compartmentalise devastation and heal through art.
Filmmaking also becomes a form of therapy for Julie. She returns to the fictional Raynham Film School (Hogg herself attended The National Film and Television School in the 1980s) and has one sole ambition for her film: “It has to be something that people are not going to forget as soon as the credits roll.” It is a promise both to herself and to Anthony. From the off the familiar student financial burdens are bandaged by Julie’s upper-middle-class identity. Filmmaking hurdles, namely the sheer cost of production, are solved with a handwritten cheque for £10,000 from her doting mother. Instead, Julie’s first hurdle is with her professors. With producer Marland beside her, Julie presents her short film pitch to the school’s grey-haired professors. “I don’t want to show life as it plays out, I want to show life as I imagine it,” Julie says, emotionally embattled and attempting to re-frame what she’s just lived through. She’s met with raised eyebrows and comments on how the innovative idea lacks professionalism. Having her vision, the culmination of her mind and heart, so unanimously disregarded is soul-destroying.
The pushback against Julie’s project echoes frustration shared by writer-director and founder of Rianne Pictures, Caris Rianne. “It was [after] going to film school, being frustrated from film school, and wanting to create work that was telling our lives and not a diluted version,” Rianne says of her drive to create women-focused narratives with her production company. All the filmmakers in conversation speak to this desire to represent the multifaceted nature of womanhood, and point to the most valuable storytelling lessons occurring onset, doubling as a de facto film school. This notion becomes visualised in a short sequence of The Souvenir Part II when Julie steps on set, and Hogg’s sweeping camera swirls around her to capture a small smile. Her earth-toned outfits have evolved into more bold looks – shiny silver trousers with her hair pushed back, she is in her element as a filmmaker.
Meanwhile, fellow film student Patrick – you’ll never know if he’s high or just sober and pompous – is commanding the set in his pale lemon suit and brushes Julie away with the flick of his wrist. With his unpredictable temper tantrums and niche (but not really) taste, his set presence is a grand spectacle of self-indulgence. In contrast, Julie’s directorial style involves more intimate conversations of motivation with her actors and a less hierarchical set structure.
“We’ve seen so much with the #MeToo movement. Being a filmmaker before and after that is completely different in some aspects, but [the misogyny] is still there,” Rianne says. As if proving this very point, The Souvenir Part II sees Patrick scream at his crew and remain unquestioned on his graduate project – an illustrious black and white British musical – while Julie is in a constant battle for the reins of her film. She justifies every directorial choice with “because that’s what happened” and then faces the wrath of an irate cinematographer frustrated with how Julie’s indecision is pausing production. The process of recalling her past with Anthony becomes like a surgeon taking a scalpel to themselves; removing ribs, one by one, until the heart is on full display for judgement. When anyone criticises Julie’s characters, they’re criticising her.
When the time comes to see Julie’s cinematic untangling of her fraught love, what ends up projected onto the cinema screen is not the film we’ve observed her write and direct. Instead it subtly echoes Hogg’s surreal 1986 graduate short film, Caprice. We see Julie’s fictional Julie step into an imploding dreamworld of fleeting ghosts in a hall of mirrors, digging into undusted corners of the unconscious, a microcosm of her disorientating grief.
At Julie’s graduate premiere screening, she introduces her film as a “gift to someone I once knew and loved very much.” Perhaps this is a gift to herself, too, a memorial to her grief. Both Julie and the filmmakers I have spoken to create work that immortalises emotions, and the process of creation involves looking inwards to represent womanhood on screen. “I never have an exact idea of what it’s going to be, I just start writing,” Winter-Hill says. Julie, too, is guided by where the pen takes her. Hogg’s portrait of a woman as an artist becomes about a woman reassembling parts of herself through her own cinematic lens.
Julie’s project articulates what she is not able to say in words. It draws a parallel to a notion shared by Robinson-Ward who says her films often deal with topics people don’t discuss as much as we should. “Maybe that’s the culture we have in this country, the stiff upper lip,” she says. Grief is one of these topics; Julie’s stoicism means addressing her own deep-seated emotion is painful. Extracting meaning from her grief is like drawing a self-portrait without a mirror, the result resembles her but has a life of its own.
In the end, we come full circle. Having first met Julie, in The Souvenir, at a smoke-hazed party where she tiptoes through the crowd, The Souvenir: Part II leaves her hosting another party. Now, she slides through the packed room with ease. She has found herself in the crowd, but Hogg ties the loop with one final sweep of grandeur that reveals Julie’s (and, subsequently, Hogg’s) self-referential mindset still lingers.
In sharing the minutiae of these intense emotions The Souvenir: Part II makes a personal story universally felt. It is that shared understanding that filmmakers so often yearn for, as Winter-Hill says: “I love the fact that I can make things that can connect with people and maybe help others deal with their own thoughts, problems and stories.”
Emily Maskell (@EmMaskell) is a film critic and culture writer from the UK. When she's not writing, she's reading film scripts in an oversized jumper and cradling the biggest mug of tea she can find.
The Souvenir Part II is out in UK cinemas on February 4.
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