The Souvenir Part II

AroView: Joanna Hogg’s beautiful and bold meta-drama about a film student making a film in the 1980s about the events that took place in her 2019 arthouse hit. The new film offers a thrilling insight into the vulnerability and determination of an emerging artist, wonderfully played by Honor Swinton Byrne (daughter of Tilda Swinton, who also stars in both films), and is bound to be all over the best film lists of 2022.

In the aftermath of her tumultuous relationship with a charismatic and manipulative older man, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) begins to untangle her fraught love for him in making her graduation film, sorting fact from his elaborately constructed fiction. Joanna Hogg’s shimmering story of first love and a young woman’s formative years, The Souvenir Part II is a portrait of the artist that transcends the halting particulars of everyday life — a singular, alchemic mix of memoir and fantasy.

“Though fully distinct in its thematic and aesthetic fixations, The Souvenir Part II abuts its predecessor to form one of the medium’s most intimate, expressive portraits of the artist as a young woman — a mirror tilted just enough away from the filmmaker that the audience, too, can catch itself in the glass.” ~Guy Lodge, Variety

“This is a story about the importance of making mistakes, of learning, of pulling yourself up and trying again – whether in love, sex, art or friendship. It’s a delirious ‘making of’ film: the making of an artist and the making of a life in all its messy glory.” ~Dave Calhoun, Time Out