The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019) (Patreon)

A Twitter acquaintance of mine, Jeva Lange, wrote a terse but dead-on review of The Souvenir on Letterboxd. She simply remarked, "This is a horror movie." Now, she responded much more positively to The Souvenir than I did. In fact, a quick check of Letterboxd and a few other informal metrics seems to indicate that while a simple majority of my friends have generally appreciated the film more than I did, an overwhelming majority of my women friends have liked it more than I did. And this prompted some thinking.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

This is the story of Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), a young film student in Britain from a middle-class family who falls for Anthony (Tom Burke), an upper-class attache for the government's Foreign Office who, at least to my eyes, has "scoundrel" written all over him. He is smug, arrogant, and casually puts Julie down under the auspice of offering her advice. But, given the elliptical mode of Hogg's storytelling, we don't exactly see how or why Julie overlooks these flaws and falls for him, aside from her obvious insecurities. We simply see that, over time, she does.

It soon becomes apparent that Anthony is a heroin addict. A common acquainance (Richard Ayoade, in a terrible performance) basically informs Julie of the fact outright, but she simply refuses to perceive it, and as Anthony's behavior becomes more dangerous and erratic, and eventually abusive, he makes excuses but also explains that really, it is partly her fault too, which she willingly accepts.

As a kind of "horror film," The Souvenir is not unlike watching a defenseless heroine go into the dark basement filled with sharp objects, over and over and over again. In fact, Julie's self-abasement feels less like recognizably codependent behavior than a programmatic, thesis-driven example of such a pathology, the kind of hypothetical concoction that a graceless filmmaker produces to Make a Point. 

At the same time, one does recognize the isolating influence of an abuser, the all-encompassing manner in which a sick relationship develops its own rules and logic, to the exclusion of any outside reality testing. And I wonder if this aspect of The Souvenir feels compelling and, if not realistic per se, at least intellectually recognizable to some audiences. (And in fact, Hogg has implied in various interviews that The Souvenir is somewhat autobiographical.)

But there is a fussiness to Hogg's compositions, her use of mirror reflections and the frames-within-frames of doorways and wainscoting, as well as her allegorical B-plot of terrorism in the 1980s (the Irish Troubles, Libya) and Anthony's involvement in "keeping the U.K. safe," that speaks to an overdetermination of means. I can understand an artist wanting to use their art to exact control over the telling of a story from their lives in which they themselves were profoundly out of control -- a kind of mastery of trauma through repetition. 

But Hogg keeps both herself and us at a theoretical distance, telling us at each moment how we are supposed to respond, which is with an admixture of horror and detachment. My keeping us at bay, she seems to want to determine in advance how we will perceive Julie, to foreshorten any possible judgment we may have of her. The fear is understandable, but all the aesthetic gestures in the world cannot defend against the undecidable fate of a message sent out into the world.