The Souvenir

Nothing on TV I want to watch, so last night I take refuge in mubi, my second home. Tucked away in their library they have The Souvenir. I faintly remember rave reviews last year, keeping a note that I’d catch it if it came to any cinemas nearby (it’s by no means guaranteed that high quality films will reach us out here). It looks beautiful, it sounds great, and has a stunning cast - Tom Burke, and Tilda Swinton with Honor Swinton Byrne, as a real-life mother-daughter act. I hated it. All that’s wrong is the main idea, the story, the script. It’s about Julie’s doomed relationship with Anthony, and how that messes up her life. She’s a well-off film student, set on making a film set in working-class Sunderland. We don’t see her going there, talking to anyone in Sunderland, talking realistically about what she’s going to do and how she’ll go about it. We see her and Anthony sparring, and her falling for his superior comments on her project, just like she falls for his taste for highclass hotels, and habit of continually scrounging off her. I get it that bright people don’t always make bright choices, that it can be hard to escape from abusive relationships, but I just don’t believe in any of this, or care about it. She breaks away, tells a fellow student that she’s over it and concentrating on film school now, but the first hint of another posh lunch that she’ll have to pay for - and away she goes. The film students are generally a bunch of pretentious tossers, there as background so she can demonstrate her superior intelligence by offering her view of Psycho, but there’s very little about the excitement of loving films, the mad ambition of setting out to make them. i’m sure Joanna Hogg knows about that, since she has Martin Scorsese and Michael Wood on board as executive producers, but it didn’t come across to me. Today I check the reviews. Mark Kermode loved it. Peter Bradshaw loved it. The Observer thought this was one of the best ten films of the year. They also said that it was autobiographically based, and that makes a whole lot of sense - which I shall hold on to as I sneak back down into my obscure burrow, where I know nothing about film.