Sensational: The Souvenir reviewed

Joanna Hogg’s films are the antithesis of popcorn entertainment so if it’s not the antithesis of popcorn entertainment that you seek, you may be better off going elsewhere. Her latest, The Souvenir, is about a young woman finding herself and her own voice, and is semi-improvised and I know someone who hates her films — ‘like watching paint dry,’ I was told — but if this is so, I have never seen paint dry so enthrallingly. I was fascinated throughout, in fact.

This is her fourth film after Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013), and it is her best, I think. (Although I will always have a very soft spot for Unrelated.) All of her films are somehow about people trapped by their own privilege — I am wondering if it’s worth thinking of her as the Ken Loach of posh people — and The Souvenir is no exception. However, this time out it is an autobiographical drama, based on a particular relationship she had with a particular man in her early twenties while still a film student. Set in London in the 1980s, Honor Swinton Byrne plays Hogg’s younger self, now called Julie. Julie lives in the Knightsbridge flat owned by her rich parents who are otherwise at their country pile in Norfolk. Her mother (played by Tilda Swinton, Swinton Byrne’s actual mother) sometimes visits and fusses about lamps. Julie knows she lives ‘in a bubble’ and is therefore planning on making a film about poverty in Sunderland. Julie is sincere and eager but still wears little cardigans as offset by brooches so may not be ready for poverty in Sunderland. This is Hogg asking: for an artist, what experiences are valid?

Now on to Anthony. Oh my God, Anthony.