Shortly after film school-the period covered in The Souvenir’s two parts-Hogg directed music videos, then spent decades working in television. Hogg is 61, and only released her first film in 2007, but with The Souvenir seemed to pioneer a radically memoiristic style of filmmaking. Nico sings a torch song, and we’re back in Julie’s world-and, deeply, in Joanna Hogg’s.
Her parents tell her she is welcome to hide out at home for as long as she wants, but she demurs, and we then see her in the elevator, familiar to us from Part I, heading up to her cozy old Knightsbridge duplex, wearing the same boxy black coat that swaddled her through The Souvenir Part I and cast her as both ambivalent pariah and wannabe artist. Julie wakes up in her childhood bedroom not long after she’s lost her first great love, Anthony, to a heroin overdose-the tragedy that defines the final act of The Souvenir: Part I. Honor Swinton Byrne (daughter to Tilda, who plays her mother in the film) returns from the first film as Julie, a film student struggling to become an artist, whose character is based on Hogg herself. Joanna Hogg’s new film The Souvenir: Part II technically opens with a shot of the English countryside, but the movie really begins with a coat.
