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.
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