One of my souvenirs of this round of COVID is a puffy red right eye. It's basically pink eye/conjunctivitis, as far as I can tell, and the eyelid being very swollen makes me look a bit like a boxer who's gone too many rounds. It also looks pretty concerning to everyone else in the house. I got it on the first day and it has yet to recede noticeably, though at least I'm not having the thing I had yesterday, where I needed to shut my eye whenever I stood up to help control the pressure that resulted from that act of sudden ascension.
Having a messed up eye has not so far prevented me from having another projector marathon in the garage, where I have been isolating even after my wife got her positive test two days ago. That test has only meant that I've slept in the bed the last two nights, which has been a relief. I haven't generally changed my daytime isolation, in part because she is happy to convalesce in our bedroom. Even if you can't get the other person sick, being sick is fundamentally a solo activity.
Although I could knock out a significant number of the movies still on my watchlist prior to closing my list on January 24th, I also don't want to massively exceed last year's record total of 170 movies ranked. I'm at 151 now, having fit four 2022 viewings into the last few days, as well as two rewatches and three movies I'd never seen from other years.
And in truth, I actually only have about 20 more movies (in 24 days) that I consider must watches, with some of them only rising to that level because of the ease of getting a hold of them. Each year at this time I whittle down my Letterboxd watchlist to a list on paper that includes only the movies I realistically will still prioritize seeing, and as of this writing there are only 19 movies on that shorter list. Very manageable, such that I might devote today, the last day of the year, to knocking out the remaining episodes of Andor, with maybe just a single movie to break things up.
Ray was the first non-2022 movie I watched during this second COVID marathon, but I already wrote about that. Today I'll write about the other two, and not just because they've inspired the subject of this post -- though I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I thought of the post title first and what I wanted to say second.
There's another sort of 2022 homework I realized I could accomplish, by catching up on some prior viewings that will place a new viewing in a different context. One of those 19 titles is Joanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter, which is the third in what we might rightly consider the SCU (Souvenir Cinematic Universe). Hogg's 2019 film The Souvenir and her 2021 sequel The Souvenir: Part II both feature characters who appear in The Eternal Daughter, and even if this third movie may not be directly part of that two-part story, those movies will certainly be useful background. I had seen neither.
Fortunately, I only had to rent one of the two, as the sequel was available streaming for free on Amazon Prime.
SPOILERS FOR THE SOUVENIR AND THE SOUVENIR: PART II.
I'll say right off the bat that I didn't go for these movies like other critics did. I'll also say that they work a lot better in conjunction with each other than they do independently. That's a rather obvious statement for a sequel, but a first movie should stand on its own two feet. This one does not, probably because Hogg always knew she was going to make a second, listing the fact that a sequel was coming in her closing credits.
The Souvenir is effectively a roman a clef for Hogg, exploring her days in the late 1980s as a film school student, in the form of a character named Julie (pretty close to Joanna), played by Tilda Swinton's daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne. Her real-life mother plays her mother here, though it's a smaller role.
The much larger role, other than Byrne's, goes to Tom Burke, who I quite liked in this year's The Wonder. My feelings about him in this film could not be more opposite. He plays, what I called in a rant to a friend, "an obnoxious, superior junkie prat." Yes that's right, his Anthony is an older intellectual who oozes into Julie's life on a wave of negging and generally disagreeable behavior. Part of that behavior is that he's revealed to be a chronic heroin user, though you wouldn't know it by looking at him -- he looks more like an effete academic gentleman who looks down his nose at everyone.
The problem with The Souvenir, as I saw it, was that Anthony does nothing to deserve what comes to be a strong romantic dependence on him by Julie. In retrospect, I determined that Hogg didn't want to make a film in which grand romantic gestures and magical moments manipulate the audience into seeing this as a "special" romance, a cinematic romance. It's much more humdrum, as most romances are. But that doesn't change the fact that I needed something from Anthony other than just the mild disdain, haughty wordplay and ultimately dispiriting junkie behavior that defines him. There's realism and then there's too much realism.
This becomes a major issue because the movie really doesn't have all that much to do with her experiences in film school -- she starts to miss a lot of class time due to her obsession over this twat -- but only to do with their relationship. For sure, this is probably close to how Hogg experienced it at the time, assuming it was based on a real experience from her life. (I could look it up, but, I have COVID so nah.) But it makes for an insufferable viewing experience. Throw us a bone, please, Joanna.
The Souvenir looks a little better when it is ultimately revealed as source material for The Souvenir: Part II. Here's the important spoiler: Anthony finally has his overdose and dies near the end of the first movie. Good riddance, I say. Julie is obviously torn up about it, in part because she believed she loved him, and in part because she may have felt like she turned him away at a time of need -- probably not resulting in the overdose, but not helping either. Surely, she did enough to enable him before then, to the point that we kind of disdain her (I think Hogg may have disdained her own self in that relationship), but maybe the previous enabling was part of the problem as well. With drug addicts, you're damned if you do too little and you're damned if you do too much.
In any case, Part II didn't get off to a very good start for me because it picks up almost immediately after the end of the first movie, and therefore, Julie is still quite actively mourning Anthony. So if I already heaped scorn on the first movie for giving this asshole too much of its emotional investment, the second starts off in exactly the same way. I was rolling my eyes, which is not great when you have one swollen eye.
Fortunately, the direct grief over Anthony recedes, and we see how Julie uses the experience of that relationship to make a film about it. This is an important bit of growth for her, because her original idea for a graduation film, pitched at the start of the first movie, was to make a movie about dock workers. Her professors called her out that she didn't know much about that, and urged her to consider something closer to her own experience. She gets there with the film she makes in Part II.
So while I was still annoyed that so much energy was being devoted to Anthony, I did appreciate exploring how a filmmaker uses life experience to guide their artistic choices. The Souvenir is our chance to see what happened; The Souvenir: Part II is our chance to see how Julie interpreted it and committed it to celluloid. I wished Hogg had been just a bit more on point with that mission statement, as she does meander a bit, depicting some ultimately random experiences Julie has during this time (that she herself probably had when she was that age), checking in on characters who ultimately don't matter that much. I also could never really figure out the function of her parents, who are very supportive but whose role doesn't seem to extend beyond that. Maybe Hogg just wanted to make a tribute to them. Maybe more will be revealed about them in The Eternal Daughter.
Hogg almost lost me when she brings back Burke for a sort of fantasy sequence near the end of Part II, which seems to be an allusion to the long dance sequences we find in the third acts of classic Hollywood musicals. The impressionism of this extended scene left me feeling we are back in prime Anthony mourning mode, when I thought we were finally all done with that. I still don't feel like these two movies should be devoting so much time to a guy who was clearly a total prat.
However, I did ultimately get there with The Souvenir: Part II, landing on a three-star assessment on Letterboxd that could grow the more I think about it. The Souvenir remains at two stars, though I had originally considered giving it 1.5 and would have done so had I not immediately watched the sequel. (I still wonder how people who had to sit with the original Souvenir for two years before the sequel liked it as much as they did.)
So with that I will unceremoniously wish you a happy new year.
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