The Souvenir: Part II is Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to The Souvenir (2019) but it’s not your regular sequel. It’s not Sing 2, for instance. It’s not the exploitation of a franchise. And it’s not as if the industry has run out of original ideas for autobiographical films about becoming a film-maker in London in the 1980s. The two were always conceived as a pair telling the one story — and they would have been made back-to-back had Hogg not run out of money. So it’s the one story with a wait in-between which, admittedly, has been a trial. Did Julie make her graduation film about working-class kids in Sunderland? Which sounded like the worst idea ever. Also: has she moved on from Anthony?
This has already appeared in many top ten film lists, although audiences may not love it as much as critics
The film picks up where we left off, with Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne; terrific) still processing Anthony’s sudden death from a drug overdose. He had been her boyfriend, her first, and it was a toxic, abusive relationship yet she had been infatuated. She is recuperating at her well-off parents’ country place and I could watch a whole film just about her parents: her emotionally repressed, always sensibly dressed mother, Rosalind (Tilda Swinton, Honor’s real-life mother), and similarly repressed yet sweet father, James (James Dodds). They love their only child hugely but can only nibble at the edges of showing that. It is painfully touching. You can’t tear your eyes from them. If there were to be The Souvenir Part III: Rosalind and James Walk Their Springer Spaniels, I would be up for that.
As Julie deals with her loss, she wonders if she ever really knew Anthony. Why didn’t she clock that he was a heroin addict until so late in the day? Did he really work for the Foreign Office? She visits his parents.
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