The Souvenir Part II (2021)

The Souvenir Part II (2021)

An insightful look into the painstaking process of translating one's truth onto the cinema screen

The Very Best

8.1

Movie

Ireland, United Kingdom
English, French
Drama
2021
FEMALE DIRECTOR, JOANNA HOGG
Alice McMillan, Amber Anderson, Ariane Labed
108 min

What it's about

In the aftermath of her tumultuous relationship with a charismatic and manipulative older man, Julie begins to untangle her fraught love for him in making her graduation film, sorting fact from his elaborately constructed fiction.

The take

After 2019's The Souvenir—a drama about a toxic, suffocating relationship—director Joanna Hogg brings back her protagonist (played by a superb Honor Swinton Byrne) and sees her attempting to communicate the experience of this failed romance through her thesis film. Anybody with an interest in the production process of cinema should glean a ton of useful advice from The Souvenir Part II's mundane on-set interactions and difficult conversations about the line between compromise and practicality. And through increasingly surreal images of stages within stages and reflections within reflections, Hogg paints a complex, intelligent portrait of cinema as a place of ultimate self-examination.

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