What is “The Souvenir”? In Joanna Hogg’s autobiographically inspired 2019 drama, that title appeared to refer specifically to an 18th-century Fragonard painting depicting a young woman (the heroine of Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, apparently) carving the name of her lover into a tree trunk. In that film, set in the 1980s, Julie Harte (played by Hogg’s goddaughter Honor Swinton Byrne) is introduced to the painting by an enigmatic man with whom she is falling in love. Like Hogg, Julie is perplexed by what the painting means and by her own increasingly tumultuous feelings for her mysterious companion.
In this flipside second instalment of Hogg’s most personal and surprisingly most accessible work, the word “souvenir” takes on a rather more metatextual meaning. This time the film itself becomes a kind of cinematic keepsake, a memory of a memory (or a dream of a dream?) set in the aftermath of Julie’s relationship with the heroin-addicted Anthony. An overwhelming presence in the first episode, as portrayed by Tom Burke, Anthony is now an even more confounding absence, leaving Julie struggling to make sense of their former life together, with all its mysteries and misdirections. Who was her lover? Did she ever really know him? Did he actually work for the Foreign Office? Where did he go as the end approached? Who did he talk to? What was he thinking?
