The Souvenir: Part II, written and directed by Joanna Hogg, picks up pretty soon after the events of its 2019 predecessor. In that 1980s-set semi-autobiographical drama, an aspiring filmmaker from a wealthy background named Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne, in her acting debut) shed a great deal of her trusting naïveté after surviving her first major
relationship — with a worldly, 10-years-her-senior public servant, Anthony (Tom Burke), who hid a heroin addiction. (After robbing Julie near the end of the movie, Anthony dies of an overdose; in The Souvenir’s farewell shot, Julie is pushing through her fresh grief on a film set — the place where she will spend most of Part II.) Wonderful enough to be self-contained, that 2019 movie achingly depicted first love and youthful feelings of possibility; it also placed Julie’s filmmaking ambitions secondary to her worldview-changing romance. Part II, in contrast, puts the character’s dawning directing career at the front. And it interrogates how the relationship — for which she continues to grieve, look for answers to — informs her still-developing creative sensibilities. (This sequel plays a little more fast and loose with the facts of Hogg’s life, too.)
Taken together with its other half, Part II completes one of cinema’s more affecting coming-of-age sagas: a tenderly felt — and meaningfully self-critical — work that richly captures a young woman not only coming into her own as a person but an artist, with Byrne fluidly conveying Julie’s slow transformation from naif to confident artist. Though rarely not stunningly rendered (one could argue the movie could inquire more into Julie’s mourning, what she makes of her artistic preoccupations), the film is at its most dramatically electric chronicling the production of Julie’s graduate project.
Its start is rocky. Julie abruptly throws away her original idea in favor of an autobiographical story about her relationship with Anthony. But the suggested-to-be surrealistic adaptation of her experiences, as laid out in the red ribbon-laced screenplay she passes out to the (all-male) professorial board with the power to give her funding, is rejected; she’s forced to borrow £10,000 from her unflaggingly supportive parents (played by Byrne’s real-life mother, Tilda Swinton, and first-time actor James Spencer Ashworth, who is a farmer by day). The rocks keep piling. Julie’s lead actors (Harris Dickinson and Ariane Labed) are puzzled by the dynamic of the relationship they’re simulating almost as soon as shooting begins. (They find Julie’s equal to be perplexingly gullible and trusting.) And several crew members — also students — grow exasperated by this embryonic director’s inexperienced slips, like deciding to change a camera setup at the last minute or her frustrating lack of foresight around something as simple as handing out a day’s production schedule.
Hogg nerve-wrackingly captures the wing-and-a-prayer energy of a low-budget movie set, where there never seems to be enough time or money, and the built-into-the-job uncertainty as to whether things are holistically coming together in spite of the negative energy of the environment in which it was made. She also cannily shows how making this student movie, for Julie, is at once freeingly cathartic and a little embarrassing. It’s an avenue to process something formative — and to really understand, for the first time, how potentially insightful and resonant art can come from personal suffering — while also having to be confronted with mortifying past immaturities, all in front of an increasingly judgmental crew.
All the pain feels worth it when we watch Julie’s finished movie (or what is more accurately a dream-like projection of what Hogg wishes it were, through her now-wiser eyes). This likably pretentious abstraction, which takes up some 15 minutes of the Part II, speaks not only to Julie’s newfound maturity but also how correct she was to hold strong amid doubt. The beautiful thing about directing, Hogg tacitly says, is how transformative it can be, and how well it can function as a sharp tool for personal excavation and self-discovery. It’s a means to fuel self-growth in ways that might not have been possible otherwise; it’s almost besides the point if the grad movie is “good” or not. I’d be curious to see additional parts of The Souvenir continue cropping up every few years or so, elaborating on Hogg’s young avatar even more. But the meta last line of the movie — “cut!,” apparently interjected by Hogg herself from behind the camera — has the conclusiveness of someone writing the last line in a years-in-the-making book. The author is changed forever, but also eager for what comes next.
REBECCA HALL HAS HAD A KILLER 2021. In The Night House, an ambitious horror movie released a few months ago, she gave one of the year’s finest performances. And now, with Passing (Netflix), Hall has written and directed one of 2021’s best movies. (It also happens to be her first effort as a filmmaker.) This adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel announces the long-criminally-underappreciated Hall not merely as a competent filmmaker but an extraordinarily gifted one — a rarified talent whose aesthetic command never overshadows the drama but instead enhances it to the point of making the film itself feel like it’s breathing.
Set largely in Harlem, just before the onset of the Great Depression, Passing begins on a swelteringly hot summer day. Irene (an exceptionally agitated Tessa Thompson) is out running errands, and, wilting under the day’s sun, decides to rest in a hotel café in a wealthy part of town, per a recommendation from her cabbie. It’s a stressful pit stop, given that Irene, shrouding the top half of her face with a chic cloche hat, is a light-skinned Black woman. She has managed all day to pass for white in a majority-white area; every moment is nauseous with the threat of “discovery.”
This visit unexpectedly becomes momentous. Irene, all nerves as she sits, notices that sitting a few tables over from her is her estranged childhood friend Clare (Ruth Negga, terrific). Clare, another light-skinned Black woman, makes the first move — a gesture that frightens Irene at first (she thinks she’s been found out) in part because Clare, until letting out a laugh a few moments into their conversation, is completely unrecognizable. This bleach-blonde and glamorously dressed woman has spent the last several years of her life passing for white full time, we learn. Clare has been married to a white businessman, John (Alexander Skarsgård), since her 18th birthday, and they have a daughter together: their first and only since Clare’s pregnancy was one of chronic fear. (There is exactly zero chance John would react rationally to the suppressed truth: When John briefly meets Irene, whom he mistakes for white, he makes racist remarks with a casual smile, and has an astoundingly horrific nickname for Clare, whose skin, to his eye, seems to get darker every year.) At least during this early meeting with Irene, Clare is adamant that her decision to blend in with white society has been an almost complete positive.
Irene and Clare’s reunion will not merely be a one-day thing; it seems to awaken something in both people (“I wouldn’t feel this wild desire if I hadn’t seen you,” Clare confesses in a subsequent letter to Irene). Meet-ups become more regular, although Irene never seems quite comfortable in any. Suddenly more aware of her loneliness than ever, Clare is increasingly overwhelmed with the feeling that she has “missed out” on the masquerade-free life she could have had. She looks at Irene — who is married to a doctor (André Holland), has two sons, and works as an activist with the fictional Negro Welfare League — with longing: as someone who is “happy, free, and safe.” (Irene resents this rosy perspective.) Clare begins tagging along with Irene and her husband at the League’s social events, despite the dangerous potential of John finding out. Tragedy seems imminent. John seems inclined to violence, for one thing. But even if he weren’t to find out, Clare now finds herself in a spiritually depleting bind.
For Irene, Clare seems to invoke a complicated array of feelings: envy (of Clare’s social ease; wealth; a potential attraction between her and Irene’s husband), extreme worry, disgust, implied romantic desire, and self-interrogation, given her own fleeting experiences with passing. Devonté Hynes’ minimalist piano-heavy score, which calls to mind streams of water splashing into rocks, never returns to the safety of a repeated sonic idea. It’s like a restless brain turned into music, smartly complementing Irene’s inner rumble.
Irene’s perceptions of the world around her are central to the drama. How Clare brushes against them, and how Irene is guilty of some of the very same things she holds her old friend in contempt for (Irene has colorist beliefs and is adamant that her sons pay as little notice as possible to the ugly realities faced by Black people, for instance), are sharply examined by Hall. Her exceedingly discerning and intuitive (but always understated) screenplay impressively skirts a didacticism a less-assured filmmaker might have fallen victim to.
Hall’s visual ideas, strikingly brought to life by cinematographer Eduard Grau, have a similar intuitiveness. Passing, shot in black and white, is overlit in scenes where a character feels particularly exposed, paranoid about how they’re viewed in others’ eyes; then it’s shadow-seeped in moments alone, where overthought and mental retreads of past events fogs up the here and now. Shrewd uses of close-up help elucidate Irene’s interior life in particular. Regular uses of mirrors and shots from Irene’s point of view buoy how Clare’s arrival in her life has put how she sees herself in a vulnerable, always-in-question place. The material in itself cultivates a certain claustrophobia. But Hall’s mournful, inspired presentation of it makes Passing feel a little like a muffled scream that can’t be let out, in movie form.
Peterson Reviews 