the souvenir (w&d hogg)

1984. Thatcher’s Britain. An elegantly wasted young man called Anthony. The Fall on the soundtrack. There was a lot about The Souvenir that felt familiar. 

It’s curious that the publicity for the film has suggested a sub-Downton world of elegant dresses and tuxedos, as though the publicity people feel it’s impossible to market a British film which doesn’t posit itself beneath the chandelier of post-war imperialism. Anthony is always dressed in a slightly fogey-ish manner. He’s the anti-Thewlis from Naked. One who has concocted a myth around himself that’s part Lawrence of Arabia, part Bond, which actually conceals the fact he’s a desultory heroin addict. An alternative way of looking at Anthony would through the refracted mirror of another doomed youth figure from the early Thatcher years, Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead. Except Anthony isn’t really posh, he just affects to be. Anthony's pose is in fact a commentary on how the British are so readily suckered by the image of the charming aristo. In contrast Julie, the film’s protagonist, is posh, but affects not to be. Hogg opens her film with documentary footage of Sunderland, where Julie has thoughts of making a film, as though to affirm that she, like her fictional filmmaker, is determined to move away from her pigeonholing as a doyenne of the upper middle classes. 

Although The Souvenir is still a film steeped in the complexity of the British class system, it succeeds in being far more than a film about class. It’s about love and drugs and notions of feminine strength, as well as being a meta-film about filmmaking. It’s this density which permits the film to get away with its somewhat lugubrious storytelling, dragged out to the bitter end. There’s always something going on, the unexpected is around the corner. Some of the deviations - the trip to Venice - feel like adornments, tacked on to flesh out the spectacle, as much as the narrative. Yet at other  times, the juxtapositions, between opera and pop music, between the overblown Harrods dining rooms and the council estates, feel like a jagged, effective way to portray a country which was evolving and adapting, seeking to construct a new identity, one it is has never really found. 

Hogg captures the nuances of Julie’s strength, masked by passivity, putting the boot into all those theories of the active protagonist, showing how someone can grow through experience and resistance, as much as through becoming a warrior. The love affair between the two leads is delicately painted, with tiny moments of convincing, intimate humour, illustrating the way in which two ill-matched souls could fall for one another. Without ever quite grabbing you by the guts, something Hogg has never seemed inclined to do, the film carefully builds. Living with an addict is not a black and white scenario. It’s full of greys, some light, some dark. The temptation is to paint the addict as dysfunctional, asocial, alarming; but The Souvenir doesn’t do this. Instead it shows, in a world where being a misfit is a necessary evil, how two misfits can help each other grow, and, perhaps, survive. Or perhaps not.