The Souvenir review: arch dramatist Joanna Hogg returns home for her most personal film yet

Dir: Joanna Hogg; Starring: Honor Swinton-Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade. Cert 15, 119 mins.

The girl in the frame has a name, and it is Julie. The central figure in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1778 painting The Souvenir is scratching her lover’s initials on the trunk of a tree, rapt in romance, while her spaniel looks up quizzically, and a billet-doux lies on the grass by her feet.

This tiny canvas, no bigger than a photo frame, catches the eye of another young woman as she walks through the Wallace Collection in Joanna Hogg’s mysterious, seductive, thrillingly controlled new film. Her name is also Julie, and infatuation is closing in on her fast.

Played by Honor Swinton-Byrne, the 21-year-old daughter of Tilda Swinton making a by-any-measure revelatory screen debut, Julie is an aspiring filmmaker searching for her voice. What she finds is Anthony (Tom Burke) – an urbane, pin-striped civil servant with whom she forms an intense and ravaging romantic bond.

The setting, as well as the lead character, indicate a degree of autobiography on Hogg’s part here: it is London in the early 1980s, where the first act of Thatcherism is drawing to a close. The capital is grey and severe – a backdrop for bad news bulletins – but Julie lives a few stories above the outside world, in a small Knightsbridge flat with mirror-tiled walls and views of other snug, Sloaney housing blocks.

This is Hogg’s fourth feature, after Unrelated, Archipelago and Exhibition, and her trademark feel for the telling specificities of time and place has never been sharper: the parallels she suggests between Julie and Anthony’s relationship and Britain at the time give The Souvenir the edge and oomph of a state-of-the-nation work, even as its focus becomes pricklingly intimate.

Julie applies for and gets into film school, and Anthony moves in with her. The two take a romantic trip to Venice, visit Julie’s protective, upper-crust mother (played with light-touch tenderness and wit by Swinton Sr), and host dinner parties at Julie’s flat – the exact layout of which Hogg implants in your mind with architectural precision. Yet there is a flashing red light above Anthony’s sometimes-strange behaviour that Julie’s sheltered upbringing has caused her to overlook.

“I’m trying to work out where you two tesselate here,” a friend of Anthony’s, played by Richard Ayoade, says to Julie one evening – and sure enough, the pair have become locked together like jigsaw pieces, even as Anthony’s self-destructive side puts her career, and later safety, at risk.

Anthony is no bad-boy heartthrob, though, and Burke expertly shows the jangling unease just below the calm establishment surface – as he perches awkwardly on chairs with a lit cigarette pinched between his fingers, he looks like a clothes horse that won’t be folded up.

He serves as the film’s artistic conscience, too, and his own views on cinema bleed into the fabric of The Souvenir itself. “We don’t just want to see life played out as-is,” he tells Julie during their Wallace Collection visit. “We want to see life as it is experienced within this soft machine.” He also identifies as a Powell and Pressburger fan: “I think they’re very truthful without necessarily being real,” he says.

That tension between reality and truth is at the heart of Hogg’s film, which keeps gliding in and out of dreaminess – never more so than during the couple’s trip to Venice, a slippery, expressionistic interlude in which the spectre of Nicolas Roeg looms large.

Hogg’s films often feel like gerbilariums, in a good way – you look in on her characters from a friendly giant perspective as they nibble and scurry around in their tank. The Souvenir is the first in which you sense she’s left the lid open. In tackling a story that is presumably, and perhaps painfully, close to home, she has made her farthest-reaching film yet.

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