THE ART OF VULNERABILITY
To say that The Souvenir is a personal project for British filmmaker Joanna Hogg requires a finessed understanding of what this clichéd description means. A hoarder of letters, diaries, photographs and miscellaneous creative mementos, Hogg has both returned to a specific period in her life – London in the 1980s when she was a film student and in a tumultuous relationship with a troubled man – and also recreated it. Production designer Stéphane Collonge projected old photographs taken by Hogg as exteriors to the windows of the central apartment, itself an inch-by-inch reconstruction of her old Knightsbridge flat, albeit based, like most of the set, within a former RAF hangar in Norfolk.
Casting herself, as it were, was a long process. While she quickly settled on Tom Burke to play the lover, Anthony, it was only after an arduous search that Julie went to then 19-year-old first-timer Honor Swinton Byrne, daughter of Hogg’s friend-ofmany years, Tilda Swinton, who acts as Julie’s mother. It’s saying something that the resulting films transcends all of these meta layers, standing as a painfully raw and structurally rigorous account of a sensitive young woman trying to move forwards creatively and romantically.
was granted an audience with Hogg and Swinton Byrne and noticed within one second (the pair embraced passionately on the moment of reunion, then rushed off to see the hair stylist’s small dog) that theirs is a relationship more akin to family than professional co-workers. We started by diving straight into the deep end, cutting to the quick of this rich, elegiac film and asking about
