THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 3

Joanna Hogg's THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER is a quietly powerful, emotionally devastating film that effectively continues the mother-daughter-film-maker triangle depicted in Hogg's previous films SOUVENIR parts one and two. Honor Byrne's young film-maker from those films has now grown up into Tilda Swinton's Julia and Tilda Swinton's Rosalind is now the more elderly mother of the film-maker. And of course, Julia is still a thinly veiled autobiographical expression of writer-director Joanna Hogg. And if you think that's all too meta, remember that Honor Byrne is Swinton's real life daughter.

Okay so back to THIS movie. It's late at night and a taxi pulls up to a country hotel wreathed in mist. My kind of horror film plays out: the surly lone receptionist can't find Julia's booking and makes a fuss about giving her a first floor room even though the hotel appears to be empty. Still she makes the best of making her mother, Rosalind, comfortable. The next day Julia struggles to work on her new script about her relationship with her mother, and seems to be hyper-sensitive to any discomfort her mother might feel. It emerges that Rosalind actually grew up in the house when she was taken in my her aunt during the Blitz.  And in successive visits over the decades, Rosalind's memories are sad as well as happy.

Rosalind seems to have that phlegmatic no-nonsense, self-effacing character of her generation, as epitomised by our late Queen. But Julia is so desperate for everything to be perfect for her mother that she breaks down at the slightest bump in the road. We realise that their relationship, while loving, does not in fact rest of mutual understanding and intimacy. 

As for the rest of the plot I am not sure we needed it. The references to ghost stories, eery bumps in the night, amd self-proclaimed mystery seemed to me to cheapen the whole affair and provided very little actual suspense.

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 96 minutes.  It played Venice, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival 2022.

THE SOUVENIR II***** - BFI London Film Festival Day 3

Julie is grieving the death of her charismatic, controlling, deceitful boyfriend Anthony. She doesn't know if she misses who he was or just the companionship and intimacy of love. She expresses her grief in her student film, a memorial, or Souvenir, if you will.  And in making the film, she rediscovers her sense of fun and takes joy in her friendships. We leave her still aware that she is inchoate and waiting to find her voice, but optimistic. And we leave the film, conscious that writer-director Joanna Hogg, who has created this fictionalised version of her life in this film, has indeed voice her voice with this deeply felt, technically audacious, often hilarious, film.

Viewers who have not seen Hogg's previous film, THE SOUVENIR, may struggle to understand why Julie is so driven to capture her relationship with Anthony. Without Tom Burke's dominant presence, I feared that this sequel might lose its purpose, much as Julie feels unmoored at the start of the sequel. But as the film progresses we see Julie find her way, thanks partly to her unstintingly supportive if somewhat anachronistic parents (Tilda Swinton and a drily hilarious James Spencer Ashworth). She also progresses with her student film despite her supercilious film professors, but with the support of her best friend Marland (Jaygann Ayeh). Along the way there are moments of desperation - and searching for connection - and the lightest of touches with the tragedies of the 1980s when a gay editor reveals his boyfriend has been sick for a while.  Richard Ayoade also returns with a scene-stealing turn as an arrogant film student with dip-dyed hair. The problem is that he's not wrong in what he says! Julie should move on.

But what raises this film to a level beyond that achieved in the first part of THE SOUVENIR is Joanna Hogg's greater confidence in exploring the meta-textual nature of making a film about her own student film-making. I LOVE that the student film we finally see bears no resemblance to the verite-footage we have seen so far, but leaps into Fellini or Red Shoes ballet -esque surrealism. Bravo!

I also hope that Honor Swinton Byrne continues to act. She has a natural charisma and empathy that shines through the screen. I'd love to see what kind of range she has.

THE SOUVENIR II has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated R. The film played Cannes and the BFI London Film Festival 2021. It will be released in the USA on October 29th 2021 and in the UK on January 21st 2022.

SOUVENIR

THE SOUVENIR is writer-director Joanna Hogg's personal memoir of her time as film student in London in the early 80s and a love affair she had with a charming but dangerous older man.  Set largely in a meticulous recreation of Hogg's Knightsbridge flat, we are introduced to the fictionalised Julie (Honor Swinton Burne) as a naive, privileged, earnest and desperately vulnerable young woman.  At first, her relationship with Anthony (Tom Burke - finally finding a role to flex his muscles in) seems innocent enough, although the age gap is troubling, as is his domineering personality. But we, as Julie, as her parents, are lulled into a sense of complacency by his posh accent and apparent Foreign Office job. Soon we discover that all is not as it seems - earlier in fact than the alarmingly innocent Julie. It starts with him cadging a tenner, and ends with a kind of emotional domination and abuse, centred around a character twist that I won't reveal.  The tension of the film lies first in knowing whether Julie will gather the strength to leave Anthony, and second in whether her mother (played by Honor's real-life mother Tilda Swinton) will intervene.  

As in her previous, outstanding, films  - UNRELATED and ARCHIPELAGO - Joanna Hogg creates these wonderfully tense, nuanced, naturalistic chamber pieces where characters are trapped in seemingly ordinary conversations but so much is going on in their interior lives - so much is unsaid - and the stakes seem so high. Tom Burke is absolutely superb as Anthony, in the most difficult role of creating a character at once despicable, but also pitiable, who we have to believe is charming enough to be loved. Honor Swinton Burne is not called upon to show such range, but is convincing in playing a shy young woman. If THE CROWN needs to cast a shy young Diana they need look no further. And stealing the show, we have a deliciously funny cameo from Richard Ayoade with one of the most quotable lines in film. I'd repeat it here but it gives away too much plot!

Kudos to Joanna Hogg, whose idiosyncratic scripting and shooting style got the best out of a new actress and creates a slow-build tension and genuine emotional involvement in the lives of these characters.  One must also comment on how she captures particular visuals - a shot of the Grand Canal (perhaps one of the most hackneyed scenes and yet so beautiful and apparently fresh here) - or a disagreement in a hotel room that's so emotionally difficult to behold that we see it reflected in a mirror.  This film really is unique, disturbing, beautiful and melancholy.  I cannot wait to see the second part. 

THE SOUVENIR has a running time of 119 minutes and is not yet rated.  The film played Sundance 2019 where Joanna Hogg won Grand Jury Prize - World Cinema - Dramatic.  It will also play Berlin 2019. It does not yet have a US or UK release date. 

ARCHIPELAGO

Joanna Hogg's debut feature, UNRELATED, was an emotional drama so quietly powerful - so cleanly produced - that I was tempted to tag it Pantheon and dare history to prove me wrong. Her second feature, ARCHIPELAGO, has all the virtues of UNRELATED, and if less immediately gripping that her first film (perhaps because expectations are so much higher?), is still miles ahead of most current cinema in its ability to mine the deeply held frustrations of familial relations. ARCHIPELAGO is a satisfyingly uncomfortable watch - a movie both darkly funny; raw; bitter; and all finely balanced on a knife edge.

The film begins as Edward (Tom Hiddleston) arrives on the Cornish holiday island of Tresco to spend a final fortnight with his family before abandoning a City career for a year's charity work in Africa. The fortnight will consist of walks, bicycle rides, picnics, painting and the occasional dinner. Edward's mother Patricia (Kate Fahy) and sister Cynthia (a scene-stealing Lydia Leonard) are already there not to mention a cook, Rose (Amy Lloyd) and a painting tutor (Christopher Baker). But, much to Ed's chagrin, his girlfriend Chloe hasn't been allowed to come because she's not family with a capital "F", and much to Cynthia and Patricia's discomfort, the father doesn't show up either.

And this brings us to the meat of the story: what family is and what one should expect of them. Ed's family are not supportive of his belated gap year. His mother is quietly negative. ("Ed's decision doesn't reflect badly on his father" when clearly she thinks it does.) His sister is openly, brutally critical. One can tell that both are hitting somewhere near the mark - Ed clearly doesn't know what he is about to do - but there means of expressing it is truly poisonous and stems in some part from frustration with the absent father.

As the film progresses, each member of the family reveals more of themselves despite the covering layers of upper-middle class politeness. There are, however, no big dramatic revelations - no moments of crisis - no moments of catharsis followed by closure. Joanna Hogg maintains the tone of strained emotions throughout - eschewing big bang finishes for an authentic examination of real emotions. The purity and austerity of this approach is underscored by her shooting style, which typically uses static cameras in still frames which may or may not include the faces of the people speaking; avoids introduced lighting often leaving her characters in darkness; and avoids artificial sound-tracks making those uncomfortable silences even more ominous.

The resulting film is difficult, honest and painful, because so much of the behaviour is recognisable. Like her previous film, UNRELATED, ARCHIPELAGO seems to live in a space where characters live in self-delusion but are stripped bare in a sequestered environment. Interns of content, Joanna Hogg reminds me of Nicole Holofcener, the American director who has made similarly painful, scabrous films about the emotional lives of the upper-middle classes. But the austerity of Hogg's style is quite unique.

ARCHIPELAGO played London 2010 and goes on release in the UK today.

UNRELATED - so good I'm tempted to tag it "pantheon"

UNRELATED seemed much longer than its run-time and that's a good thing. It feels long because it's intense, and because you feel you have come to know and sympathise with a group of complicated, interesting people in an almost unbearable situation. It's been a while since I've seen a movie featuring actors that look real - middle-aged women with crow's feet - and act real - making wrong choices that aren't movie-cute or contrived. And it's certainly been a while since I've seen a movie where I was so on edge, desperate to know how it was going to develop.

Anna is a middle-aged, middle-class woman. She arrives at a Tuscan villa at night. It's so dark you can't see her face. A group of teenagers, rich with the arrogance of youth, wonder who she is. She tries to sleep despite their loud talking. The following morning she meets their parents - her friends - but she's equally awkward with them.

Perhaps it's boredom that leads the kids to adopt her as a token member of their group. Soon Anna is flirting with "Oakley" and he flirts back. It's excruciating to watch her watching him. Eventually, when she pushes the moment, he backs off and she has to go through the indignity of being an outsider again. The situation becomes even worse when a big family row proves how far she has no place with them and, as far as we know at that point, no place with her husband back in England. Finally, Anna comes full circle. She is back at the villa at night, but instead of partying with the kids in a desperate act of recapturing her youth, she's annoyed by the loud talking. She's an adult again, dealing head on with her emotions.

Kathryn Worth is outstanding as Anna and she is supported by a note-perfect cast. Mary Roscoe is utterly convincing as her stalwart best friend and David Rintoul has a rather chilling role as the other "old" George. Among the kids, Tom Hiddleston is quite brilliant as "Oakley" - the charming young man who is quite aware of his impact on Anna but equally just wants to boff the girl in the villa next door.

UNRELATED is testament to the fact that big budgets, flashy effects and saccharine endings aside, cinema can be powerful and insightful and intelligent. That it is a debut feature is even more impressive. I can't wait to see what Joanna Hogg does next.

UNRELATED played London 2007 where Joanna Hogg won the Fipresci prize. It is currently on release in the UK.