The Wallace Collection, on Manchester Square, in central London, contains art works that were gathered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by successive Marquesses of Hertford. The museum, occupying a Georgian mansion, opened to the public in 1900, and is particularly known for its fine eighteenth-century French paintings—among them a small and delicate work by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, which is known in English as “The Souvenir.” It shows a young woman carving an initial into a tree trunk. She is wearing a gown of pink satin, its color enhancing the blush of her cheek. At her feet lies a letter that, presumably, was written by the lover whose initial she is inscribing. She looks dreamy yet determined: the woman is caught in a reverie, but she is also making her mark.
Joanna Hogg first saw “The Souvenir” in 1980, when she was twenty years old. She was taken to see it by a man with whom she had a charged acquaintance, which soon developed into a consuming love affair. At the time, she was living in Knightsbridge and working in Soho, as a photographer’s assistant; she aspired to become a filmmaker but didn’t quite know how to go about it. She wasn’t sure what to make of the Fragonard, or why the man wanted to show it to her. Hogg had spent her teen-age years at a boarding school deemed suitable for the less academically inclined daughters of the affluent and titled, and she had not gone to college. Her companion, who had studied art history at Cambridge University and at the Courtauld Institute, in London, struck her as immensely more knowledgeable. Nine years her senior, he was brimming with the confident, ironical charm bestowed by élite English schools. He wore double-breasted pin-striped suits and bow ties, and he had pronounced aesthetic preferences: Symbolist opera, the movies of Powell and Pressburger, a brand of Turkish cigarette with an elliptical shape.
During the next several years, Hogg enrolled at film school while her lover continued introducing her to his tastes and reshaping her sensibilities. He also exposed her to a less elevating aspect of his personality: a ravaging addiction to heroin, of which there was an epidemic in London in the early eighties. The drug came to dominate their relationship, and the relationship came to dominate Hogg’s life.
Hogg, who is now fifty-nine, recently made a movie, “The Souvenir,” about those years; it will be released on May 17th. The character who stands in for Hogg, named Julie, is played by Honor Swinton Byrne, the daughter of Tilda Swinton (who plays Julie’s mother). Hogg’s lover, named Anthony in the film, is played by Tom Burke. “The Souvenir” is an unsparing depiction of what now would be called codependency but was then simply understood as anguished first love.
The film is obsessively autobiographical. It was shot on an inch-by-inch reconstruction of Hogg’s elegant student digs—a pied-à-terre that her parents kept in Knightsbridge. The set was furnished with objects from Hogg’s youth, including an ornate antique French bed that she and her lover had bought, for a hundred pounds, at auction in 1982. Hogg found old letters and incorporated them into the film. “The vile beast knows itself and miserable he is with it,” Anthony writes to Julie, as Hogg’s lover once wrote to her. “It is you who has power over the beast; to cheer, to encourage, to reprimand, to forgive.” Stretches of dialogue replicate conversations that have been inscribed in Hogg’s memory for decades. Even some of the footage comes from the eighties, when she toted around a Super 8 camera, filming friends and her environs. The production designer of “The Souvenir,” Stéphane Collonge, painstakingly reconstructed the views from the Knightsbridge apartment by digitally combining photographs taken by Hogg. When Julie goes to the window after hearing a nearby explosion—the bombing of Harrods by the I.R.A., in 1983—she looks out on the exact same skyline that Hogg saw when her apartment was shaken by the blast.
The film also offers a moving depiction of Hogg as a would-be artist, delineating the kinds of inhibition that can hinder even a person born to privilege. She began taking notes for “The Souvenir” not long after emerging from the relationship with the man who took her to the Wallace Collection, the traumatic conclusion of which is shown in the movie. (Hogg declines to name the man publicly.) In an entry from 1988, Hogg wrote, “Everyone congratulates her on how well she is coping with it. Ironic because she isn’t ‘coping’ with it at all—she won’t allow herself to.” But Hogg didn’t tell that story, or any story, for years. She didn’t release her first feature film until a decade ago, when she was forty-seven, and “The Souvenir” is only her fourth movie. This summer, Hogg is shooting “The Souvenir: Part II,” a continuation of the story of Julie’s early adulthood. Together, the films will implicitly tell another story: that of a female artist’s belated emergence in middle age, and her discovery that she could create art out of experiences that had once seemed like lost time.
In the short period that Hogg has been making movies, she has established strong visual signatures: she prefers long, often distant takes with a fixed camera, and tends to work with available light. She has become known as a precise and compassionate observer of the British upper middle class, a segment of society that is often either caricatured or glamorized onscreen. Her films have the layered psychology and narrative depth of a nineteenth-century novel; while working on “The Souvenir,” she reread Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady.” Hogg’s films examine the world she comes from without embarrassment. “Archipelago” depicts a young man who feels burdened by the expectations of his well-to-do family. “Unrelated” focusses on a group of Britons who go on an extended sojourn to Tuscany. They take in the Palio, shop in Siena’s boutiques, drink Negronis as they lounge by a fifteenth-century villa’s twenty-first-century pool, and play awkward party games that keep the dangerous possibility of real intimacy at bay.
One morning in April, I took the train to Norfolk, two hours northeast of London, and continued on to a former Royal Air Force base near the village of West Raynham. The base closed in the mid-nineties, but in recent years it has found a second life as a business park and an occasional filming location. Part I of “The Souvenir” was almost entirely shot there in the summer of 2017, much of it in one of the base’s vast hangars. A corner of the hangar stood in for the studio where Julie and her film-school classmates work on their projects; when I visited, numbered pieces of “Flat L,” the apartment where Julie lives, leaned against the hangar’s walls, ready to be reassembled for Part II.
Hogg finds it effective to isolate the cast and crew at a single site for the entirety of a shoot. “It’s about containing the energy,” she told me. “Unrelated” (2007), Hogg’s first film, was shot in a villa outside Siena where Hogg had stayed a few years earlier, while taking a painting course. The cast lived there during filming, and the crew stayed in a property down the road. The same method was adopted for “Archipelago” (2010), her second film, which is set in a vacation home in the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall. In “Unrelated,” which cost only a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to make, the bedrooms did double duty as sets. Hogg discovered that the arrangement also served an artistic purpose, fruitfully blurring the boundary between reality and fiction. Tom Hiddleston, whose first major film role was as an arrogant, wounded Etonian in “Unrelated,” and who has appeared in three of Hogg’s films, told me, “If you’re an actor and your character decides to put the kettle on, if it’s the same kettle you’ve been using every morning for the last six weeks, there’s something about the way you’ll do it which will be very natural. It’s not a prop kettle—it’s the kettle you used this morning to make a cup of coffee. The actors become part of the fabric of the scene, because they’re living it all the time.”
Hogg drove me around the base at West Raynham and explained that it had become “another kind of island.” The cast of “The Souvenir: Part II” was to be housed in nearby accommodations. The actors’ costumes were being collected largely from local thrift stores, although the costume designer had re-created some key pieces, such as Anthony’s ankle-length navy-blue housecoat—instantly recognizable to cognoscenti as part of the uniform of Christ’s Hospital School, a Sussex boarding school founded in 1553.
The shoot for the sequel was to begin in several weeks. That morning, Hogg was looking for a stand-in for the office of a therapist she had visited in her mid-twenties, toward the end of her relationship, when she was seeking help with understanding her life and work. She went with Collonge and her director of photography, David Raedeker, to survey a dilapidated block at the base where newly arriving airmen had once been received. Hogg walked down a dim, dirty corridor. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” she said to Raedeker, who was following her, camera in hand. “I remember the place I went to as being quite run-down.”
Hogg, who is birdlike in build, with a thin face and shoulder-length dark hair, entered a room where light streamed through large, partly broken windows. If the room were darkened with blinds, she decided, it could serve as the consulting room. “I think that it’s O.K. that it’s an enclosed little world,” she said. She recalled to Collonge that there had been nothing clinical in the room, and that a couch and upholstered chairs had offered a sense of security to troubled visitors like her. Later, Collonge told me that working with Hogg was unusually intimate. “You still have to do breakdowns and drawings and plans, but it becomes the fusion of my sensibility and hers,” he said. “It’s completely from the inside out, rather than the outside in.”
The paint on the walls was peeling like fish scales, and the floor, covered in institutional carpet, was littered with dead leaves. The room looked unpromising as a therapist’s office, given that the movie’s low budget would not permit much renovation. But Hogg could vividly envisage the scene, in part because she had amassed extraordinary documentary material that would inform her direction of it: her sessions with the therapist had been recorded, and she had kept a stash of some of these audiocassettes, which captured her younger self discussing her relationship and the projects she aspired to do in film school. As broken glass crunched underfoot, Hogg’s imagination was at work in concert with her memory. “There’s nothing wrong with this carpet,” she said, briskly. “It just needs a good clean.”
In the mid-eighties, Hogg told me when we first met, she was “very confident, and very unconfident.” We were talking, over tea, in the lobby of a hotel in Shoreditch, a fashionable part of East London. She shares a house in the area with her husband, Nick Turvey, a visual artist; they have lived together since 1990. She went on, “I really had these two sides of me, where I thought I could make groundbreaking cinema, and make a big noise in my filmmaking, but at the same time also not be able to do any of that, and not be even sure who I was as a human being.” Hogg’s manner is wry but reserved. Although she imbues her work with her personal preoccupations, she is uncomfortable talking about herself. “Creatively, I am at my most comfortable when I have got a project, a raison d’être,” she said. “Take that away from me and put me at a dinner party or something—that is really not where I want to be.” In a memorable scene in her third film, “Exhibition” (2013), an exploration of the married life of childless artists, the couple endures a suffocating supper with friends who insist on discussing difficulties they are having with their adolescent offspring. The artist wife pretends to faint, in order to engineer an exit. “I always fantasized about doing that,” Hogg told me, adding, “It would be a bit difficult to do it now.”
Hogg grew up thirty miles southeast of London, in Kent, near the town of Tunbridge Wells. The very name is a byword for provincial conservatism. (“Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” is the imagined signoff of someone who writes outraged letters to the London papers.) Her father, John Hogg, commuted to work in London, where he was the vice-chairman of a large insurance company. Her mother, the former Sarah Noel-Buxton, was descended from a prominent family that included missionaries, abolitionists, and Quakers. Crispin Buxton, who is Hogg’s cousin (and the eighth Baronet of Belfield), was an associate producer on “The Souvenir.” He told me, “There was an energy we all grew up with. It wasn’t always very seemly to be seen to be having too much fun.”
At eleven, Hogg was sent off to West Heath, a nearby boarding school of only a hundred and thirty girls, some of them members of the grandest families in the country. Lady Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales, was in the class below. Hogg, who found the regime inimical, was shy but somewhat rebellious: she was once caught smuggling a copy of Playgirl into her dormitory, and the headmistress disciplined her by seating her in her office and asking her to turn every page of the magazine and offer commentary. Tilda Swinton, a family friend whose father had gone to boarding school with Hogg’s father, was a classmate at West Heath. She told me, “We were supposed to be independent from the age of ten, in a way that we clearly weren’t, but we had to fake it.” Buxton said that the school was a milieu in which academic excellence was not even encouraged. “The societal expectations would be: Queen’s Secretarial College, find a good husband, be a dutiful wife,” he said. Swinton told me that when she attended her brother’s graduation from Harrow, an élite boys’ school, the headmaster declared that the boys were the leaders of tomorrow. She went on, “I distinctly remember, the following week our headmistress gave a speech in which she said, ‘You girls are the wives of the leaders of tomorrow.’ ”
Hogg steered clear of the finishing-school set, finding a small group of peers who, like her, were interested in the visual arts. After graduating, she and a friend moved to Florence, to study photography. “We were very clear, at age seventeen, that we were going to Florence not in a traditional kind of girl-going-to-language-school kind of way,” she said. They found an American woman in her thirties to be their photography teacher. “It was a really amazing thing to be taught how to look, how to observe,” Hogg said. She made a photograph of a wall, near the Santa Croce basilica, on which someone had put graffiti handprints. “It was a really beautiful sort of image—the hands, and the textured ripple of the wall behind it,” she said. “That was the first serious attempt I made to look at something—not photographing a person, just photographing a wall.”
She stayed in Italy for a year. On returning to England, Hogg moved into the Knightsbridge flat, which she shared with a succession of roommates. She got a job with a photographer on Greek Street, in Soho, and on off-hours she was allowed to use his studio for her own photography, developing images from a series showing visual artists and dancers at work. She also started carrying around her Super 8 camera; she hosted parties but hovered in the background, behind her lens. Swinton, who delivers a nuanced performance in “The Souvenir”—with an Hermès scarf tied under her chin, like the Queen, and a clucking helplessness—recalls the young Hogg as a quiet, watchful presence in the bohemian swirl. “I really believe that the reason Joanna has so many photographs is that deeply, unconsciously, she was living through this time knowing that she would make a piece of work out of it one day,” Swinton told me.
When Hogg was nineteen, she switched her creative focus to film. “I had the slight feeling that still photography wasn’t enough—that I wanted to tell a story,” she said. She had some early encouragement from Derek Jarman, the avant-garde filmmaker, whom she approached in a Soho café, asking to assist him on his next movie, “Caravaggio.” Jarman invited her to visit him at his studio, and she went, bringing along a portfolio of photographs and drawings. “He said, ‘You should start making your own films, rather than come to work on mine,’ ” she recalled. But Hogg wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. She spent months trying to develop a feature film set in Sunderland, a working-class city in the North of England. Hogg had visited Sunderland, a former shipbuilding hub that had fallen into decline, while shooting a photographic series about the work of two visual artists. She wanted to tell the story of the city’s devastation through the figure of a small boy who fears his mother’s imminent death. “But when I sat down to write it I realized I didn’t have the tools to do it,” Hogg said. “I didn’t know, inside out, that place and those characters.”
Around this time, she met the man with the heroin addiction. He immediately called into question her choice of subject matter. “He sort of threw it back at me,” she recalled. “He was quite critical of the fact that I, from this background, would want to make a film so far from my experience.” These conversations are mercilessly re-created in “The Souvenir.” Hogg set the Sunderland project aside. Her lover’s critique was harsh, but it rang true. Hogg told me, “I wasn’t at that point in time able to look at my own life and turn it into something.”
An affair that coincides with an artistic reversal: this is where “The Souvenir” begins. The movie poignantly shows Julie channelling her creative energies into the stumbling conduct of her life, rather than into the making of art. Today, when the standard for a young female artist’s self-fashioning has been set by the precocious accomplishments of the likes of Lena Dunham, Hogg’s slower, more inhibited path to self-expression can be painful to watch. Yet this trajectory will be eminently recognizable to any viewer who has felt, especially in early adulthood, as if she were performing the role of herself, rather than simply living it. “I have done big productions, but they were productions in my life,” Hogg told me. “That phase was very much about me being a protagonist in a production, in a way.”
Her lover’s secretiveness and deceit—not just about his addiction but also about other aspects of his life—contributed to this dynamic. “Rather than make my own films when I was with him, I was in a film—a genre film, a Hitchcock film that had a lot of mystery and intrigue,” Hogg recalled. “I did a lot of detective work, I dressed very glamorously, I went to glamorous places.” “The Souvenir” replicates a luxurious trip to Venice taken by Hogg and her lover; Hogg’s elaborate preparations for the journey extended to commissioning a tailor to make her the kind of travel suit that Janet Leigh would have worn. The night before the couple’s departure, the trip was almost scuppered by an apparent robbery in Hogg’s apartment, in which her jewelry, her cameras, and other valuables were stolen. Hogg quickly realized that her lover had faked the theft, and had sold the items for drugs; nevertheless, the trip went ahead. “I had spent months planning, and didn’t want to give up on the plan,” Hogg said. “The show had to go on, and there was so much in the show—so much dreaming, all the ideas. It was creating a piece of work.”
In 1981, Hogg enrolled at the National Film and Television School, in Beaconsfield, outside London. Trix Worrell, a creator of British sitcoms, was a classmate, and remembers that, although Hogg had strong opinions, she was discreet in making them known. “The Souvenir” shows Julie’s professors, all male, patronizing her; she absorbs their criticisms with mild good manners. Underneath, Hogg told me, she resented how she was treated. The experience still stings. “Those moments—they are hard to let go of,” she admitted. In “The Souvenir,” Richard Ayoade plays a supremely confident young filmmaker whom Julie encounters at a dinner party; he reappears in Part II, as the director of one of several movies-within-the-movie. Some of the characters in the “Souvenir” films correspond to real people, but Ayoade’s character, Hogg said, is “a composite of all the arrogant film directors I’ve ever met.”
Hogg, influenced more by her lover than by anyone at film school, developed an appreciation of more stylized cinematic modes. She also had an intense interest in fashion. Worrell said of Hogg, “She was very aware of the next new thing, like the Issey Miyake pleated things—she didn’t flaunt it, but if you came up close it would be ‘That’s a really good cut.’ ” Hogg’s graduation film, a short titled “Caprice” (1986), starred Tilda Swinton in a dark fantasia about the fashion-magazine industry, inspired by Technicolor Hollywood musicals. Hogg planned to follow it up with big-budget projects, including a feature film called “London Paris Rome,” which she and a friend, who worked in advertising, pitched to studios as “James Bond meets the cosmetics industry.” The project didn’t get far off the ground; nor did a project called “Gorgeous,” which Hogg described to me as “like ‘Brazil,’ but in a department store.” She said, “As with the Sunderland film, I tended to go with these very ambitious ideas that were almost unrealizable.”
Instead of making feature films, Hogg found herself making pop-music videos, including one, for the 1987 Johnny Hates Jazz hit “Shattered Dreams,” that reworked ideas from “Caprice.” (It has nineteen million views on YouTube. “I’ve never had such a big audience for my work,” she said, with heavy irony.) Television jobs followed, and they became Hogg’s career for the next dozen years. She directed episodes of soap operas, such as “London Bridge,” about a restaurant in southeast London, and of “Casualty,” a long-running medical drama. “From one series you get asked to do another, and it’s always very flattering to be asked, and then you are working and earning money, and it’s very hard to dig yourself out of that,” she said. “And then the confidence is wearing away a little bit.”
Hogg did try to experiment, she said, “even if it was a really boring TV series that had nothing of myself in it.” She made one episode of “Casualty” that consisted almost entirely of a single shot, which had to be carefully choreographed in advance. There were less artistically inclined ambitions, too. Hogg was the first female director to work on a show called “London’s Burning,” about firefighters, and she and the other directors competed to see who could shoot the most minutes in one day. “I managed to do a ridiculous amount of minutes—which is nothing to be proud of, because it’s nothing to do with quality,” she said. “But there is quite a macho element—you want to prove yourself.”
In the early two-thousands, Hogg was hired to direct a spinoff of “EastEnders,” the venerable soap opera about working-class Londoners. During filming, she said to herself, “I would really like to be in a different situation, where it is my story, and my ideas.” Her sense of restlessness was crystallized by a family tragedy: in 2003, her father, a recreational pilot, died in a plane crash when he was flying solo in the Chiltern Hills. He was seventy-eight. His death opened up a sense of urgency for Hogg. “We had a memorial service a few months later, and I wrote something about him—a kind of poem of my own memories of him,” she told me. “In the process of writing that, I caught something that I wanted to continue, in terms of expressing myself in words.”
Hogg, then in her early forties, was also coming to terms with another loss: she and Turvey had tried to start a family, but she had failed to become pregnant. “Unrelated,” which she wrote after her father’s death, turns on the experience of Anna, a childless woman in her forties. She shows up at the family vacation of friends and finds herself drawn to the glowing, hedonistic society of their teen-age offspring, rather than to the dull, bourgeois company of “the olds,” as her friends are dismissively called by their children. Hogg told me, “I wanted to show someone who has some fun—I wanted some kind of lightness, as well as the trying for children and that not working out.”
Hogg had long maintained that her first feature would be a 35-mm. film, but “Unrelated” was shot with a nonprofessional Sony video camera. Unlike most movie productions, in which scenes are shot in the order in which it is most convenient to secure the necessary locations—meaning that an actor may have to play a breakup fight with her romantic partner before enacting their first kiss—“Unrelated” was filmed in narrative order. The actress who played Anna, Kathryn Worth, arrived at the villa in Tuscany several days later than the rest of the cast, in order to simulate the kind of outsider’s discomfort that her character feels. Tom Hiddleston told me, “You’re actually living it as you go, and that means Joanna could adjust the story as she goes. If something happens in the chemistry between this actor and that actor, or someone makes a funny joke, we can make a callback to it later. There was a very exciting sense of creative collaboration in the momentum.”
While shooting “Unrelated,” Hogg came to prefer very long takes; by the time she made “Archipelago,” she was leaving the camera running for forty minutes for group scenes that would last no more than two minutes in the final cut. Helle le Fevre, who has been the editor on all of Hogg’s feature films, told me, “That allows something to happen that you can’t predict—either the actors maneuver themselves into a very uncomfortable space, or a humorous space, or the sun goes down and it gives a certain intimacy.” Hogg’s predilection for wide, static-camera shots—in which an ensemble can move freely, and the actors’ body language is legibly captured within a photograph-like frame—was a repudiation of the small screen’s demand for closeups and choreographed movement.
In “Archipelago,” Hogg started to work with non-actors in supporting roles, and the couple at the heart of her next film, “Exhibition,” was played by Viv Albertine, the former guitarist of the post-punk band the Slits, and Liam Gillick, a conceptual artist. In the film, the pair have decided to sell their home, a modernist house in West London that serves as a kind of third party in their relationship. Albertine and Gillick first met less than a week before shooting began. “That distance of not knowing someone got translated into a kind of distance that happens over many years in a relationship,” Hogg said. The film, which is virtually plotless, offers an almost voyeuristic insight into the day-to-day existence of two adults working and living in close proximity. It quietly explores the unstated rivalries that arise between creative people with differing degrees of recognition; the sometimes asynchronous nature of sexual arousal; the solidarity of two people who have escaped the framework of bourgeois family life. “Exhibition” has the quality of a documentary—as though it were a film about Albertine and Gillick role-playing as a husband and a wife. Not long before the film was made, Hogg and Turvey moved out of a house, in Notting Hill, where they’d lived for seventeen years, and that willful dismantling of an established life in favor of something new was one of Hogg’s inspirations. “Some people see the film as being about the breakdown of a marriage, but I think it’s the reverse,” she told me. “I think it’s actually about a couple really trying to make a go of something.”
For “Unrelated,” Hogg wrote a script, but in subsequent movies she discarded that convention, and instead composed for each a narrative of about thirty pages, which reads almost like a short story. A scene from “The Souvenir” is depicted this way: “In the hushed Grand Hotel Piccadilly dining room the other guests, mostly couples, are much older. Anthony likes to point them out; these couples who sit quietly have nothing to say to each other. Whereas his conversation with Julie never dries up. Julie enjoys being the youngest person in the room. Underneath the dining table Julie kicks off her shoes. She places her bare feet on top of Anthony’s monogrammed velvet slippers.” Not every actor sees the text in advance. Tom Burke was given Hogg’s text for “The Souvenir” before filming began, whereas Honor Swinton Byrne arrived every day on the set not knowing what was coming—a strategic replication of Hogg’s original naïveté.
Hogg invited the principals to comb through her diaries and letters, and to explore the interests of their characters. Burke immersed himself in Béla Bartók’s 1918 opera, “Bluebeard’s Castle,” because Anthony listens to it compulsively in the Knightsbridge apartment, his taste displacing Julie’s pop-music preferences. (In a subtle shot, we see Anthony flinch with irritation when Julie dares to put on a punk-rock cassette.) Burke told me, “The work of Joanna’s that I had seen is very naturalistic, but with ‘The Souvenir’ I felt that was being prized open a little. Anthony is very much bringing that other world to Julie, which is intoxicating for her. And their relationship is hermetically sealed, similar to the kind of world that you get in an opera. It doesn’t quite make sense to anyone outside of it, but they have their own logic.” Entire scenes were built around Hogg’s providing a key idea, or phrase, to Burke and Swinton Byrne, then stepping back to let them improvise. Before filming, Hogg gave Burke a recording of a session that her lover had undergone with her therapist. It helped Burke appreciate the lover’s intelligence and magnetism: “He was able to keep the balloon in the air, and talk and talk and talk and talk, and to think very interesting things, and very insightful things—but not actually go to the root of the addiction.”
Hogg cast Burke, a fixture of British TV and the London stage, as Anthony because so much of her lover’s self-presentation had been a performance; but she needed a nonprofessional to play Julie. Tilda Swinton told me, “She wanted someone who was not an actress and had never wanted to be an actress—someone who would be uncomfortable in front of the camera. People of nineteen or twenty now are much more used to looking at photos of themselves than anybody was in the eighties, and she was looking for someone who didn’t have a selfie face.” Hogg did not immediately think of Swinton Byrne, even though she knows her well—she is her godmother. The role of Julie was cast only two weeks before shooting was to begin. On the first day of filming, which involved a party scene, Swinton Byrne felt very self-conscious about people looking at her. “That fear you see on my face is real,” she said. “I was saying, ‘Joanna, I am so sorry, can you please give me something about what I should be feeling, so that I can feel I am doing Julie justice?’ She said, ‘Just feel uncomfortable.’ I said, ‘Right, O.K. Done.’ ”
In 1988, when Hogg first started sketching ideas for a film about her youth, she noted that the story might be so expansive that it would have to be told in two parts. At the time, this seemed like a grandiose notion. But the path has since been cleared for a female artist to tell an epic story of her interior development. Given the success of such novelists as Elena Ferrante and Rachel Cusk, an extended telling of Hogg’s story no longer seems like an oversized ambition. In one of our conversations, Hogg told me that she did not have time to regret the decade and a half in which her creativity lay dormant. She paused. “That’s not completely true,” she said. “There are times when I look back and think it’s a shame, I could have made more films.” She then reasoned that, if she had started making features right after film school, she might not have been able to sustain her momentum. “And I am not sure that I would have been making the films I am now,” she went on. “So I am happy.”
In preparing to make Part II of “The Souvenir,” Hogg told me, she had come to feel that Part I somewhat exaggerates Julie’s vulnerability. She had been rereading old notebooks and diaries, which recorded other emotions: all the arguing with her lover; her constant suspicion of his behavior. She was also reminded of her complicity in allowing the relationship to take the course it did. “I am going through a process of sort of facing up to who I was, and maybe who I am now,” she said. “In my portrayal of Julie, I am not sure I have been entirely honest, in a way. It’s not that I feel I have done something wrong, or made a mistake. But something I need to do in Part II is have Julie assessing her responsibility for who she is, and her part in the relationship. She was a participant in what happened.”
Swinton Byrne told me that she sometimes had to suppress an impulse to behave in ways that were inconsistent with Hogg’s actions decades earlier. Swinton Byrne’s own reactions to her fictional lover’s perfidies were more indignant, and less compliant, than what we see onscreen as Julie’s. In one excruciating scene, after the apartment robbery, Julie elicits an admission of guilt from Anthony, only to end up apologizing to him. Swinton Byrne said, “It was so agonizing, and frustrating, and heartbreaking—to allow yourself to be pushed around.” These differences are both temperamental and generational. The film exquisitely conjures a period in which it was common for a bright young woman to defer to a man; an imbalance of experience and power was often taken as a natural state of affairs. Swinton, recalling being a nineteen-year-old adrift alongside Hogg, said, “We were lost, quite lost. We really didn’t know what being a grownup was.”
Hogg’s film lays bare the costs of that kind of love affair, but it is also honest about what can be gained. “I sort of fought the dynamic of student and teacher, as well as embraced it, because I didn’t like being condescended to,” Hogg told me. “But at the same time I thought to myself, Take it all in. And there was a lot to take in, and I did not have time to take everything in, and I wasn’t always good at taking everything in. He had a lot to give.” Among the privileges that “The Souvenir” delineates is the opportunity that may be found in the role of protégée, at a phase of life when one is all receptivity. The film underscores the value of being induced into an art of living, of having one’s eyes opened.
One bright afternoon, I joined Hogg at the Wallace Collection. She hadn’t been there for a while; the scenes set in the museum had been filmed at Holkham Hall, a stately home in Norfolk, with a replica of “The Souvenir” hanging on the wall. After ascending a grand staircase to one of the galleries, we stood before Fragonard’s original. Hogg tried to recall what she had thought and felt when she first saw it, forty years earlier. “There was something about seeing myself in the painting and wondering whether there was some message to me in showing me this painting,” she said. “What did he mean? In a way, that’s partly to do with wanting to make the film—it’s like a series of questions of trying to understand who he was, and who he thought I was, and what was conscious and what wasn’t.” Now, she said, the painting had a different meaning to her: “I see the film that I have made—the film itself has become the souvenir to him. It is almost like I am giving something back to him.”
Hogg had told me earlier that in 1988 she had put the “Souvenir” project aside largely because she had lacked confidence. As with the abortive film set in Sunderland, she had been convinced that she didn’t have the material, and the skills, to fashion a satisfying work from what was still raw experience. “I didn’t feel like I knew enough to be able to tell a story about him,” she said, having arrived, finally, at the simple modesty of self-assurance. “I didn’t realize at the time that I could tell a story about me.” ♦
