THE SOUVENIR: Memories of a Soft Machine

Joanna Hogg’s directing style is summed up completely by a line early on in The Souvenir when one of the lead characters proclaims,

“We don’t know what the inner machinations of [people’s minds] are, or their heart. We don’t know. But that’s what we want to know when we go and see a film. We don’t want to just see life played out as it is. We want to see life as it is experienced, within this soft machine.”

Based off of Hogg’s own time at film school, The Souvenir is a coming of age story that follows 24-year-old Julie—a wealthy, naive, and likable but privileged student who is studying to be a film director—through a tumultuous relationship that drags her back and forth from following her passion for film, and throwing her energy into a self-destructing partner.

The plot of The Souvenir is ultimately simple, but the experience Hogg creates through crafted imagery and scoring makes for a truthful portrayal of the human experience by juxtaposing innocence against deviance, conservatism against liberalism, and love against control. The film finds such a unique tone by using almost exclusively conversational scenes to tell the story, but embedding within them increasingly eccentric and dark details. These small breaches of the overall tone of the film are so masked by the candid nature of the actors and the proper, detached nature of British culture in the early ’80’s that it sometimes takes you a moment to even register the strangeness of it.

Many of the organic interactions that define film come from Hogg’s choice to cast Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton’s real daughter, to play the lead of the entire film specifically because of her having no acting experience (other than a brief cameo as a child). Casting a lead with no acting experience landed with such success due to Hogg’s decision to leave Byrne’s part of Julie entirely unscripted—Byrne was instructed to improvise the scenes based off of the other scripted actors performances, and from a number of Hogg’s own diaries she gave to Byrne to read over. I will admit The Souvenir is quite slow paced, but I highly recommend experiencing it for yourself. A film all about a woman’s experience, directed by a woman, is so anti-Hollywood, anti-cinema, and shockingly genuine for most feature films that land all-star Tilda Swinton.

The character who carries most of the uneasy feeling and small eccentricities throughout the film is Anthony, a somewhat well to do man with what seems to be a high-ranking government job that is fighting terrorism. He happens to also have a crippling heroin addiction that is only hidden from Julie by her own naiveté, a passionate love of opera, a debilitating need to exclusively consume fine dining he cannot afford, and he is seen wearing full tailored suits (in true bureaucratic fashion) but always with luxurious flair (like neon, multicolored bowties, colorful patterned socks, or brightly colored velvet loafers).

While the overall tone of The Souvenir is serious and even morose, the deadpan depiction of people’s quirks, flaws, and jeers offer up whispers of absurdist comedy. The absurdities scattered throughout The Souvenir are subtle; however, it strikes a satirical cord during moments like the one where Julie’s film school friend states, “[he] would never consider doing heroin, it’s just so … Mainstream.” Along with a few other moments of dry humor throughout the film, this conversation emphasizes the irony of Anthony, a seemingly straight laced government cog, hiding such an addiction. However, Julie and her young, new-wave filmmaker friends refuse to touch his drug of choice, and in Julie’s case have an almost conservative streak due to her childlike nature. Hogg also warps the audience’s experience with lurid, luxurious backdrops cut back to back with grittier moments that are sometimes literally marked with a change in film grit, or a more obvious change in setting.

Scenes often cut from a from a 5-star hotel, restaurant, or ballroom covered in renaissance paintings to Julie’s modern flat that’s either been ransacked or is littered with clues to Anthony’s heroin habit. This all adds to the never-ending dance in The Souvenir of good versus bad, rich versus poor, naïve versus hardened, riding along Julie’s split between her love for a partner and her love for her art. Hogg introduces this inner conflict of the main characters well with little to no dialogue when Anthony and Julie have sex for the first time. Hogg shows long shots of Julie’s pink sheets full of stuffed animals, her pajamas, and her comfortable distance from Anthony in a shared bed, until he takes a dominant step towards their relationship for the first time (other than his passive criticisms and challenges of Julie early on) and commands her to put on black lingerie he purchased for her, despite never being romantic previously. Julie obliges, and then when she abruptly reciprocates and initiates sex Anthony exclaims, “You’re a dark horse, Julie.”

As the film goes on there’s also an increasingly visual clash of the economic classes, when suddenly Julie has a gilded golden bed frame that she lies in casually while on the phone with her mother begging for more money “for film school,” when truthfully her toxic relationship with Anthony has taken most of her time away from her film career, and for months she has been continuously sinking family money into sustaining his expensive habits.

My last love note to this film is about Hogg’s musical choices, arguably the most critical audience cue in the film since the sets oscillate between many of the same places, and the dialogue is so organic. Many new wave and opera records are constant themes in the film, genres belonging to Julie and Anthony respectively to show the passing of time and clashing personalities. One outlier in musical choices, however, was my favorite—the dark, foreboding theme that plays over every sexual encounter of Julie and Anthony. A small nod to Hitchcock, who is referenced by Julie in the film, and other thriller movies of his era that were so heavily carried by the score (thank you Bernard Herrmann). The song adds a suspenseful and disturbing tone no matter how loving the acts of the couple were. This theme is a drastic shift from the other fast paced and very lyrical songs that saturate the rest of the film, playing on what the audience should sense rather than how the characters are feeling.

There are so many layers to be picked apart in this film, and with all of them together Hogg has created 119 minutes of a somehow darkly realistic but dreamlike world. I fell in love with this film because of how she relates to the audience through her own memories that are delivered via monologue, benign imagery, momentary conversations, and memorable records, reminiscent I’m sure of the journals given to Honor Byrne, a collection needed to paint Joanna Hogg’s true experience within the soft machine that she inhabits.