The Souvenir
Subtextual Infantilisations
To describe The Souvenir succintly, we could say it is about a film student who becomes aware that her boyfriend is a heroin addict. Yet that wouldn’t come close to capturing the sensibility evident in Joanna Hogg’s film, and her work generally. But to insist the film is about the intricacies of the English class system wouldn’t quite capture it either. Maybe best to describe it as a film about solitude and silence, and how addiction and insecurity come out of these given states. In the central character, it rests on insecurity; in her boyfriend, who would seem more arrogant than vulnerable, more assertive than retiring, it rests on addiction. If Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is trying to find her place in the world, Anthony (Tom Burke) seems already to have exhausted his. While Julie is never quite sure what she ought to be doing, Anthony is so confident that we might wonder if he became a heroin addict, believing he was bigger than the drug he was injecting.
Making claims about Anthony’s character, we need to be a lot more tentative than any we might offer about Julie’s, with Anthony a presence that is offscreen as readily as on. While we have no doubt Julie is a film student living in Knightsbridge, as we see various moments with her classmates and teachers, we need to rely on Anthony’s claim that he works for the Home Office, as the film doesn’t show us in his work environment. Initially, everything he says has an air of mystery, rather than a fog of deceit, but long before the end, the mystery collapses into the tawdry, and the signs of addiction Julie initially can’t see, as a friend spells out to her that Anthony is an addict, become the signs she cannot ignore. It is the needle and blood on a tissue; the terrible symptoms of withdrawal as Anthony shivers and shakes, or the presence of a dealer who finds himself inside Julie’s flat, and whom she can’t get rid of soon enough. It is there in the walled mirror Anthony breaks while cold turkey, and where we begin to see in Julie and her family signs of a double naivety, or generational denial. If Julie is slow on the uptake, then what about her parents, who keep doling out money that Julie insists she needs for the film she is making? When they come round for dinner at Julie’s place, there is that mirror sitting behind them, shattered. It is a good touch: any other mirror could have been put in the garbage, and a comment about its absence might have elicited from Julie no more than a claim that it fell off the wall and is now in a landfill. But that mirrored wall becomes an elephant in the room, and the awkward chit-chat that results allows subtext to sit more readily in the atmosphere than any subject apparently being discussed.
It is the un-annunciated annunciation, the unmade statement, and there her mother, her father, her drug-addicted boyfriend, and Julie are sitting around her small dining table. With candelabras and other touches that might make the event oddly homely, we see behind the father is a mirror that we know Anthony has broken. The breakage happened days before offscreen, with Julie waking up as she hears a commotion above her and hears, too, the sound of breaking glass. We may wonder if Julie has discussed with her parents what happened to the mirrored wall, but we might assume that if she did justify why it was broken, it would be unlikely to have included discussing how Anthony broke it. The scene with the mirror and the dinner comes on Julie’s 25th birthday, but the combination of being an only child with protective parents who will give her whatever she needs, and a partner who is the stronger personality, no matter his weakened immune system, leaves her still childlike.
Yet the film manages to propose that there is potentially an infantilisation to Englishness itself, and this isn’t to disparage a nation, but to see that each country no doubt has its own way (or ways) to keep a population in a state of arrested development. In France, it might be to show irritation and complain, as adults act as though petulant teens, no matter their age. In Spain, people living at home beyond a young age, and in the US, it may rest on many citizens’ belief that their country is a morally righteous nation, no matter how many bombs their governments drop. Our purpose is simply to see it in Englishness and how Hogg allows it to manifest itself. This infantalisation can be propagandistic, patriarchical, solipstistic or class-oriented, and in England’s case it is chiefly the latter. This might seem like a top-down issue that leads one’s betters to condescend to those lower down the social order, as in the famous Monty Python sketch. But that isn’t always the case, certainly isn’t only so in The Souvenir.
This needn’t be seen as special pleading on the part of a director who comes from a wealthy background. Hogg attended West Heath Boarding School, classmates with Tilda Swinton and a year above was Diana, the future Princess of Wales. No, what interests Hogg more, and what makes her work interesting, is that class as an institution infantilises anybody who takes it seriously, or takes advantage of it. When a teacher at Julia’s college proposes that it is irregular when she comes to pick up equipment without having yet worked out a budget, he says that he supposes she doesn’t really have to think about budgets, living in Knightsbridge. He wants to belittle Julie from a socially inferior position that allows him a paradoxical superiority. He may not be able to afford to live in Knightsbridge, but this gives him an awareness of real life that Julie lacks. However, his truculent claim is as much a product of class as Julie’s flat in Knightsbridge happens to be. It seems less class consciousness than class belligerence, a chance to get one over his social betters without at all indicating he will do much with it except make others feel small. It is the sort of moment that doesn’t help to dissolve class but hardens it. He humiliates Julie with no interest in making her understand privilege, only to register his resentment of its presence.
Just as this teacher playing proletarian can get to condescend towards Julie from a position of social subordination, so Julie’s parents do it from one of effortless comfort. When Julie asks her mother for money, she lies. This doesn’t mean her mother should hand it over without question; the issue is whether coming from above, or ostensibly from below, from moneyed parents or strapped film school teachers, Julie is left in an infantilised position that captures an aspect of the British class system, and how it can turn people into children. If Julie is at the epicentre of this as a person alert to sensitivities and riddled with insecurities, then Anthony seems to orbit the system, as if trying to find a Nietzschean belief that goes both beyond good and evil, and beyond truth and falsehood. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says, ‘‘there are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena’’, and a few aphorisms later adds, ‘‘there is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a cause.’’ (Beyond Good and Evil). Anthony seems close to the self-made man, even if that self is increasingly a product of the heroin he injects. When Anthony and Julie go to visit his parents, they could be strangers to him. This isn’t because they lack warmth in a brief scene over dinner that shows them as kind and thoughtful. Yet in their sincerity and honesty, they seem to have little in common with Anthony. When his father asks Julie about her film project, which is about a working-class boy and his mum in the north-east coast of England, he tells her about his own brief period in shipbuilding, before he went off to art college. Nothing he says smacks of dishonesty, while everything Anthony says needs to be viewed through the prism of smack. It is as if the drug has de-realised reality, and this might be a short-cut Nietzscheanism where truth and lies, good and bad, all become irrelevant next to the needs of the drug. When Anthony messes up Julie’s place to look like there has been a robbery, one he eventually admits to orchestrating, he says that he acknowledges it might be annoying, that he has stolen stuff from Julie, and given the impression it was a break-in, but there are things that annoy him about Julie as well. He also says, after she tries to explain how she feels about it, and that he doesn’t seem to understand, that he knows perfectly how she feels about it. That was why he didn’t tell her. Better surely that she thinks her place has been the victim of theft, rather than her realising she can’t trust her boyfriend. Yet there she now is, aware of the theft and unable to trust Anthony.
Looked at a certain way, Anthony is asking Julie to grow up. This can seem astonishingly insouciant but not entirely wrong. Sure, Anthony is a heroin addict who has stolen from his own girlfriend, but he is also someone who wants her to face up to the reality that wealthy parents and living in Knightsbridge aren’t quite allowing her to see. We might not like Anthony very much, nor the tutor at the film school snidely talking about her obliviousness to budgeting, but the film’s achievement partly rests on its examination of Julie’s naivety, without suggesting those who have lessons to teach her are characters we need care for more than we do our central character. Hogg makes Julie sympathetic but immature, yet at the same time empathises with this immaturity as the film itself feels the pain of Julie’s growing pains. Anthony is in many ways an odious character, but to come come away with this assumption is to miss out on how important he is for Julie, and to ignore what seem to be his own attempts at escaping the passive aggressive strictures of English life, ones that risk keeping everyone in a state of arrested adolescent as the unsaid becomes a form of saying, and subtext sits under situations that only occasionally someone is willing to confront.
Another such character willing to say it as it is is Patrick (Richard Ayode). During a small dinner party, Anthony disappears for a moment, and Patrick asks what the deal is as he alludes to the straightness of Julie and her junky boyfriend. This is news to Julie, and his dinner partner looks on, suggesting in a gesture that he shouldn’t go there. Patrick says he isn’t good with euphemisms and lays it out: ‘‘habitual heroin user; trainee rotarian….how, what, why, when?’’ When Patrick says he isn’t good with euphemism, the idea is that most people are, and this is how English society functions. Yet this success with euphemism also risks leaving many dysfunctional, sensitised rather than sensitive, trying to read in gesture and understatement what someone might actually mean. Directness risks looking like a form of rudeness, and yet Hogg manages to show it functioning as both obnoxious and emancipatory. None of these characters, Anthony, Patrick and the tutor, offer anything close to a heart-to-heart: it is more that they offer comments that puncture Julie’s feelings, which might, long term, contribute to a better understanding of herself and her environment.
Hogg is herself a director of understatement. Yet this doesn’t quite seem the right word to describe someone who refuses to use it to emphasise Englishness, but instead to understand it. She uses the frame, the mise en scene and the costumes to bring out a person’s singularity within a society that might easily suffocate it. England has a long history of eccentricity, and Miranda Gill says, ‘‘since the 18th century, English culture has been associated (both by the English themselves and by continental observers) with unusual tolerance towards unconventional and peculiar individuals. Even today, eccentricity is often seen as an obligatory component of the English national character.’’(‘Rethinking Eccentricity) However, Hogg is perhaps more interested in peculiarity, with the eccentric leaning into English behaviour and exaggerating it, while the peculiar tries to find a singular way of trying to live within it. Anthony would seem both eccentric and peculiar. His dress sense may reflect his job, but while we see him dressed for the task, we don’t ever see him working. When Julie waits in the car while Anthony goes to a house for some undefined reason, he says afterwards that it was for work, but we are more inclined by this stage in the film to think that Anthony visiting a council estate, where blacks stand around listening to reggae, is more likely to indicate he is there to get his fix. This needn’t be a prejudice against blacks and housing estates, but in the context of the film, it makes us wonder why someone who claims he is employed by the Foreign Office would be conducting business there, especially when we know he is a junky.
If Anthony is a peculiar man rather than an eccentric one, for all his bow ties and striped shirts, his brogues and his overcoats that must make him stand out in the druggy scene Patrick invokes, it is that the aspects of his personality don’t cohere, as they would in an eccentric, but disperse. The eccentric may be viewed as functioning outside the norm, but from this outsider position, an image is often created and cultivated, consistent and coherent. The ageing punk, the teenage Goth, that bloke in the kilt in all weathers, are types, yet Anthony doesn’t quite seem a type, and this might also be because the peculiar has mysteries the eccentric usually dispels in their consistency. Anthony is a series of mismatches, which would include the very relationship he is in, as Patrick indicates. Other anomalies include working for the Home Office but having no money, being brought up by nice, newly middle-class parents (the impression is that the dad is from a working-class background as he talks about his employment in the shipyards in an accent far less posh than Anthony’s), and having no fixed abode as he holes up with Julie. Some of these things can be explained by his drug addiction, but not all. And if we want to propose that he probably became addicted while working in Afghanistan for the Home Office, this is only partially justifiable as a reading. When Julie looks through some old photos of Anthony, one shows him in a suit and bow tie, and another wearing a Pashtun. He says the latter was taken in Afghanistan in ‘73. Nothing suggests he is lying, but he doesn’t seem to want to say anything more about it either, as he gets up from the couch and arranges things in the kitchen. The sort of opportunity for backstory revelation is stalled, and while this no doubt reflects the nature of a character who is both a drug addicted fictional creation, and also a figure Hogg has acknowledged was an important part of her life, something else is going on. What matters more is that he fits perfectly into Hogg’s work, without merely being a character replicating earlier figures.
As we see with the central character in Unrelated, the artist in Archipelago, and the female central figure in Exhibition, Hogg isn’t afraid of peculiarity, and it can give to her characters a simultaneous aloofness and vulnerability, one that makes them all very English, but can also make them feel like their own people, and not only national stereotypes or wilful eccentrics who can create a public spectacle of themselves: people who for all their outgoing behaviour, leave the private self concealed. It might even help us understand Hogg’s interest in the infantilising, and one’s escape from it. The eccentric dresses up rather than grows up, and this might be why it is important to see Anthony as a peculiarity, as if he is trying to escape something that he doesn’t quite understand, but knows the escape is necessary.
If eccentricity can often be absorbed into a conventional aesthetic that needn’t trouble form, as stereotypes can be met with a style that might offer a few wide-angle lenses to emphasise the grotesque, and can be used very well for comedy, Hogg’s is a sober, framed approach that respects the spaces around the character by creating spaces the characters exist within. She usually avoids shot/counter shot, closeups and establishing shots as given, and instead films with the idea that they are empty until human action and interaction semi-fills them, but can never quite do so. When Julie meets Anthony for the second time, after he attended one of her parties, Hogg doesn’t give us an establishing shot of the building, but instead an interior long-distance shot of the vast tea room they occupy. The place is almost empty, and Hogg holds this long shot for a few seconds before moving to a medium shot that could still appear too removed, one which Hogg holds for much of the conversation. She then moves back to the long shot and then into medium close-ups, but during them, neither character speaks. It is a great example of Hogg turning conventional form inside out (hearing the characters speak when far from the camera, but silent when in close-up), and it captures very well the notion of a space both inside and outside of ourselves that cannot quite be articulated.
This needn’t only mean that someone is inarticulate (in this scene, Anthony is fluent and Julie is hesitant and defensive). Hogg’s purpose is often to show the space where language comes up against its limits, but this limitation is paradoxical. So often what we say will be contained by what we are more generally. This is evident in the conversation between Anthony and Julie, even if Julie, nor the audience, is aware of aspects of Anthony’s life at this stage. When Anthony speaks about shipbuilding up north, we might assume it is coming from an ignorance still greater than Julie’s. There he is with his twisted vowels and his city suit, pontificating on a subject we may assume he knows nothing about. Yet a couple of scenes later, when they visit his parents, we hear his mother is from Newcastle and about his father’s work as a young man. We might shift our perspective from seeing Anthony as condescending and smug, as he initially seems probably the richer of the two of them, and hardly the man to speak of real people up north, to the one for whom these are closer to his roots, even if he shows little broader interest in engaging with them. At this stage, we haven’t seen either parent’s place, though we have seen Julie’s mum (Tilda Swinton) bustling into her home with a lamp she thinks might work in her daughter’s already cluttered flat. She may suggest money, but no more so than Anthony. It isn’t until we get an establishing shot of their country pile that we sense Julie’s parents are pretty much the landed gentry. We might assume Anthony’s privilege based on the suits he wears and the plush, tea room he invites Julie to share a bottle of champagne in, but these are aspects of an image, not quite those of a fact. Julie’s parents’ house is a fact.
Thus, even if we can speak of Hogg’s ability to show characters expressing themselves in space and situation over language, this can still contain ironies that leave us questioning this expressiveness. While Anthony is relatively articulate, or at least opinionated, as he later says he admires arrogance, telling Julie, ‘‘don’t be worthy, be arrogant’’, he is also the one for whom his mise en scene is weakest. He is, after all, keeping up appearances, and whether this is giving the impression that he is wealthier than he happens to be, or hiding his drug addiction, he is the self-made man in Nietzschean terms who has lived a little too dangerously. It is what will kill him, in an inverted variation of Nietzsche’s notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Anthony’s peculiarities get the better of him, but will Julie be able to get the better of her insecurities; will she be able to escape the loving embrace of her parents that envelops her in an inarticulate Englishness? This is a question that the film leaves both unanswered and provisionally examined. There was, of course, a follow-up, exploring aspects that The Souvenir leaves in subtext, and there is also more deliberate humour in the second film. There is still ambiguity, if less so than here. Hogg reckons, ‘‘I find it more interesting if I don’t put all the words into a character’s mouth. Something else has got to happen that’s less about what someone says and more about a way of being in front of the camera.’’ (Sight and Sound) Many great film-makers acknowledge that screen space is more important than character psychology, or at least expect the mise en scene to allude to the psychological as effectively as any flashback or backstory revelation, whether this be Antonioni, Kubrick, Fassbinder, or Bergman. But Hogg has the advantage of working within an English sensibility where self-expressivity risks the arrogance Anthony admires. When Bergman shows us the island of Faro as a milieu capturing and reflecting, without quite symbolising, the neurosis of his characters, we know that this comes partly from exhausted expression, rather than limited expression. His characters are saying what they think, but the combination of the need to manipulate and the desire to reveal, and half-unaware about how much is based on the former or the latter, requires a broader mise en scene to encapsulate the range of their feelings, rather than relying on what they say. In Antonioni’s work, expression is always secondary to abstraction, and perhaps best encapsulated in his interest in abstract expressionism, as though he wanted to put on film what painters were putting on the canvas: to see feeling not expressed through character but in shapes and figures. Nothing expresses Giuliana’s anxiety about the world in Red Desert better than seeing her smallness next to the buildings that dwarf her.
Nevertheless, in the Swedish and Italian directors’ works, this question of expression doesn’t seem related to a question of national consciousness, while in Hogg’s films it does. When she was moved from directing TV shows like London’s Burning, Casualty, and Eastenders, to her own features, she said that she was ‘‘doing everything I was told not to do in television.” (Sight and Sound) No doubt part of that was giving the films a sense of screen space that television usually denies. However, it would also concern creating hesitancies and pauses, and in offering speech rather than dialogue, with all its hesitancies and circumlocutions. It is a language that beats around the bush. In her use of space, and often the frame (as it remains at times as aloof as Fassbinder’s), as well as its use of language, Hogg captures an aspect of Englishness that is too often ignored on the screen, though too easily noticed in life. This hardly makes Hogg a social realist, but she does manage to evoke the reality of the social with great astuteness.
© Tony McKibbin