Joanna Hogg: The Performance of the Early Self by Nicola Oelofse

If you believe that the creative pursuit is a chosen path, I do not know if there was logic in my choice to pursue one. The adults I knew were not artists by profession, nor was film or theater positioned anywhere beyond the fringes of my childhood. Certainly, special occasions were celebrated with trips to our local South African cinema complexes, and although I recall the sense that these were sacred spaces; movies, and the people who made them existed as mere illusive creatures - out of reach and far away. Yet, in the fall of 2021, I found myself back at the Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute after a year spent in online training. The early days were colored by a desperate willingness to summit the infamous and often mis-understood Method; and also by what I perceived as a grotesque awareness of my own naivete. 

My classmates were people who it seemed knew infinitely more than I did. They held points of view about playwrights, could engage in thoughtful discourse around film comparison, and quote references from people who I could not distinguish as characters they wished to pursue, or their neighbor down the hall. I made an efforted attempt to hide it, too proud to publicly declare that it must have been a fluke that I found myself amongst them. But quietly, I noted their observations with a genuine desire to build a reserve of knowledge from which I might extract an opinion of my own. 

Although now I understand that part of the neurosis of placing a group of early adult artists into confined spaces, people who are inherently sensitive and ambitious to prove themselves as part of a lineage of talent, also breeds a desire to hide any symptom which might find us unworthy of the title of actor or artist or writer. I do not look back with any judgement for I do not believe there is implied negativity in the competition of knowledge or perspective, rather I believe it suggests an eagerness, a fervent desire, to want to evolve into a form of self-expression which might not yet have fully realized. Or at least, not for me.

This early adult performance of self is a central tension which dominates British filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical ‘The Souvenir’ (2019). Set in 1980’s London, and told entirely from the perspective of aspiring filmmaker Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), the first film follows the trajectory of her relationship with the cultured and critical Antony (Tom Burke) who is ten-years her senior and ‘claims’ to work at the Foreign Office. To this day, Hogg does not know whether this was factual of her lover, and Antony’s quick establishment as a character with mysterious stints of disappearing, is symptomatic of the entrapment to come, and that it seems Hogg once faced. 

Nevertheless, Julie’s attraction is not entirely unsupported. In what can be deduced as a potential-early date, Antony introduces her to a Jean-Honoré Fragonard painting depicting a young woman etching her lover’s name into the trunk of a tree. Fundamentally, they disagree whether the woman seems determined (Julie) or “very much in love” (Antony), and the namesake painting, also titled ‘The Souvenir’ in English, prophesizes the trajectory of a relationship where the allure, for both, lies in Antony expanding and critiquing Julie’s artistic endeavors and aesthetic sensibilities.

The centralization of protégé characters in tension with their art-making process is not an unexpected storytelling genre, nor one that has not already been undertaken intelligibly or successfully. While tonally different, one only needs reference Greta Gerwig’s ‘Frances Ha’ or Damien Chazelle’s ‘Whiplash’ as contributors. However, what I believe distinguishes Hogg’s perspective is the influence of her process. 

While the film depicts her early days as a student enrolled at the National Film and Television School (NFTS), Hogg would only debut her first feature ‘Unrelated’ (2007) at the age of 47. This would also be Tom Hiddleston’s film debut as the character Oakley, beginning a pattern of Hogg utilizing esteemed British talent from within her network (Honor Swinton Byrne is Hogg’s god-daughter, and the daughter of her childhood friend, Tilda Swinton). Swinton starred in Hogg’s earliest short film ‘Caprice’ (1986) and would return for ‘The Souvenir’ to play an exquisite version of Hogg’s mother – unsurprisingly.

The commentary surrounding Hogg’s privilege, and access, is one which she engages with through Julie in a scene where she must pitch her film to the all-male board at her NFTS interview expressing, “I feel as though I want to not live my whole life in this very privileged part of the world I come from. I want to be really aware about what’s going on around me”. Then, Hogg, like Julie, did want to make a film about a young boy and his mother on the docks of Sunderland, but is ultimately patronized by her professors for attempting to create something so removed from her own experience. Again, we see this reoccurrence of leaning outward from the self, and although Hogg admits to having absorbed their criticism, it perhaps led to the intimacy she now allows us to see, albeit years later.

Yes, her films succeed, in part, because of the performances of the tremendous talent and Hogg’s masterful eye in casting the non-actors she does to work alongside them, but if used as the only angle, it undersells the strength of her direction. Working non-conventionally, Hogg shoots chronologically on removed locations where the actors often live together, intentionally bringing in artefacts from her youth as source material and set pieces to promote reality. The Knightsbridge apartment where Julie lives is an exact reconstruction of Hoggs’, even furnished with the very antique French bed she and the unnamed lover had purchased in 1982. Actual letters addressed to Hogg by him in which he describes himself as a “vile beast” that only she has control over “to cheer, to encourage, to reprimand, to forgive”, are also infused throughout, as if written by Antony, and often placed over found footage that she had shot on her Super 8 camera. 

Autobiography, it seems, is almost what she is aiming for. Yet, her scripts are entirely void of prescriptiveness. Although Hogg attempted to write ‘Unrelated’ with a customary approach, she quickly abandoned the practice and instead writes what are near novelistic descriptions of the internal life of the character. The actors then interpret that document, but Hogg is hesitant to call it improvisation, claiming that the documents do hold the path for the actors, and rather it is just the words which are their own. Either way, the process is interpretive and elevates the agency of the actor entirely.

However, not all the actors receive these documents simultaneously. Burke received the outline for Antony a month before shooting, whereas Swinton Byrne only received the pages on the day she was to shoot that particular scene. The results imbue the performance of Julie’s genuine curiosity to make sense of the world around her, her almost overwhelming self-doubt, and her, at times, debilitating naivete with a level of disturbing reality.

“Stop inviting me to torture you”, Antony demands of Julie, and although cruel, it is Julie who repeatedly invites him back in. It is Julie who fulfills his request for a little more money, it is Julie who dismisses, at first, where it is that he disappears to, and it is Julie who must confront the beast that Antony referenced - that is, his high-functioning heroin addiction. At times, Julie attempts to push back, and in the most harrowing of scenes, elicits a confession from him after her apartment is ‘robbed’ where he admits to having stolen her personal belongings to sell. Finally, a small triumph in her formation, until she turns back in, and apologizes to him for her confrontation.

Perhaps I can digest the agony of watching a young woman be pushed around because the film positions itself as a memory-piece, and the nostalgic effect suggests this as a period that Hogg has overcome. The ending is both inevitable and satisfactory. Antony’s death from an overdose in the bathrooms of the Wallace Collection, where the Fragonard ‘Souvenier’ painting from his and Julie’s early-date hangs, feels to finally release Julie, and I am glad for it.

Although, some of the criticism surrounding the film rests on Hogg’s proximity to the material, claiming that the non-narrative sequencing which leaves us unclear about preceding events, or the duration of passed time, as well as the habit to cut scenes short, sometimes before characters can respond, is an attempt for Hogg to avoid conflict. Hogg admits that perhaps she did position Julie in the first film as knowing less than what she did. Or, that perhaps her memory of what was known then is clouded with the death of a significant person in her life, who left her without the opportunity to recoup gaps of understanding. 

I disagree with any attempt Hogg might be making to excuse what is left out, for the power of this film is that it does not attempt to tie untruthful logic to memory, but rather allows it to exist in its fragmented form. This experience of memory as sporadic and surprising, often elicited suddenly and without warning, speaks to the very experience of my training that I finally made some sense of at Strasberg. Memory, I understood, arrives once, and cannot be captured again in the form that it was perceived. Even in the memory of an earlier self I shared with you, I am reliving a different version now; one that understood movement, and Grotowski, and Brecht, and Stanislavski. One that simply had not learned the art of enmeshing what I foresaw as an unbridgeable difference between forms. I had not learned process.

In this transitional period post-graduation, I find myself at a cross-roads once more. I itch, slightly, to lean outward from self, to rely on inspiration, or authorship, or approval from those I deem as more of something I feel I am not yet. I see myself in Julie, as I dissect Hogg’s career for some grain of guidance. Inadvertently, Hogg provides me with a comfort instead; that experience, training, and confidence do eventually consolidate into the stories one feels compelled to tell. 

Hogg always knew that the breadth of ‘The Souvenir’ would need to extend into a second part which was consequently completed in 2021, and stars newcomers Harris Dickinson and Joe Alwyn. For the sake of maintaining my perspective of the first I have not yet watched it, but look forward to it now. Likely my view of Julie, of Hogg, will be altered but isn’t that what process is? Isn’t it knowing something assuredly, and then turning the corner and suddenly knowing nothing at all?