‘The Souvenir: Part II’ Review: The Past Spun Into Gold

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The sequel to Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical 2019 feature picks up the story of a film student trying to overcome heartbreak while creating her graduation project

‘The Souvenir: Part II” is Joanna Hogg’s sequel to her semi-autobiographical 2019 feature “The Souvenir,” which starred Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie, a film-school student in 1980s England. Sequels are unusual in independent film—no superheroes available for marketing—but this one represented a twofold risk. How do you follow a film that seemed perfect in itself, a model of compression and self-containment about a ravaging love affair and the growing pains of a young artist at a pivot point in her life? The answer, playing in select theaters, turns out to be daringly intricate and beautifully simple. Ms. Hogg has outdone herself with an even stronger film about grief, self-discovery, the daunting uncertainties of the creative process and, before and after everything else, the mysterious power of the movie medium.

The story picks up shortly after it left off, with Ms. Swinton Byrne once again at center stage and suffusing her role with warmth, grace and intelligence; more about her superlative performance in a bit. Julie’s lover, Anthony, who was played by Tom Burke in the first film, is gone, under circumstances that have left her shattered. (I’m being vague here because you may not have seen the first part of Ms. Hogg’s diptych, which you should see in order to enjoy the second part fully; it’s available on Amazon Prime Video.) The dutiful student is back in school, determined to pull herself together and complete her graduation film, a gritty drama with a documentary feel about dock workers.

Her teachers, all of them male and none of them young, are supportive. She has written a solidly crafted script; they assume she’ll be equally disciplined as a director. But Julie is beset by confusion and fears. What does she, a child of privilege, know about the working class? Fellow students tell her to deal with what she does know, to make a film about Anthony. (He, in his turn, had expressed admiration for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the filmmaker partners responsible for such sumptuous classics as “The Red Shoes” and “Black Narcissus.” Their films, Anthony said, were “very truthful without being real.”)

Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie

Photo: Josh Barrett/A24

Naturalism versus fantasy. Keeping tight control versus taking risks. These are questions that concern everyone in the arts, whether they’re writers or painters, film-school students or masters of the medium like Federico Fellini, who dramatized his agonies—to lurid effect—in “8 ½.” It’s thrilling to see Julie assert herself. “I don’t want to show life as it plays out,” she tells her teachers. “I want to show life as I imagine it.” And it’s harrowing to see her thrashing around in what may be creative chaos or simply chaos. Anyone who has spent time on the set of a big-budget Hollywood movie knows something of the pressure under which directors work. Yet the point has never been made more eloquently than by the sight of Julie at a life-or-death moment in her production—surrounded by members of her student crew who’ve lost confidence in her, and listening to their grievances in agonized silence. (Members of the professional and conspicuously gifted crew include the production designer, Stéphane Collonge, and the cinematographer, David Raedeker. )

Richard Ayoade as Patrick

Photo: Josh Barrett/A24

Ms. Hogg made her own graduation film as a student in the 1980s. It starred her friend Tilda Swinton, who plays Julie’s loving, affluent mother, Rosalind, in this part of “The Souvenir” as she did in the first one. She is also Ms. Swinton Byrne’s mother in real life, so it’s no surprise that the dual casting works well, as it did before, or that Julie is a commanding presence, as before. The revelation, though, is Ms. Swinton Byrne’s growth in the part. She marks the stages of Julie’s grief over her lost love with searing passion, yet unerring economy. Anthony once told Julie she was fragile, and lost, and would always be lost. Ms. Swinton Byrne allows us to see the contours of steadfast strength behind her heroine’s translucent terror, and then, with inspired support from Ms. Hogg’s direction, gives us the spectacle of this dear soul in distress finding her way up from tragedy through her art

Tilda Swinton as Rosalind

Photo: Sandro Kopp/A24

If all of that suggests something of a slog through emotional swamps, the opposite is true. This ultimately optimistic film almost bursts with dramatic energy. “The Souvenir: Part II”—the title comes from an 18th century Fragonard miniature of a woman, named Julie, carving her lover’s initials into a tree trunk—is a filmmaking course in its own right, with an assortment of party-ready registrants in Julie’s school that would make any venturesome young spirit want to sign up immediately. (One of them, Patrick, a student director played by Richard Ayoade, electrifies every scene he’s in with his citric tongue and carbonated cortex.)

And the films within the film! They include a stylish evocation of the Richard Rodgers-George Balanchine ballet “Slaughter On Tenth Avenue”; a masked ball in which the golden era of MGM is reflected murkily in a hall of mirrors; a music video with red shoes and a bright red car, all drenched in red-blooded sexuality; a sequence of surreal symbolism that may be meant to be meaningful or charmingly awful, the gap between genius and folly sometimes being narrow. Exactly how many films there are within the film is classified information, and I won’t breathe a word about Julie’s climactic creation, except to say that you should be prepared to be delighted, bewildered, disoriented and eventually astonished by what keeps boiling up from the wishing-well depths of her subconscious. She’s on her way, but Ms. Hogg is already there with one of the most fiercely and tenderly original movies in retrievable memory.