The Souvenir review: Joanna Hogg’s collaboration with Martin Scorsese is exceptional

The film has a superb performance from newcomer Hope Swinton Byrne, whose mother Tilda Swinton also appears

Dir: Joanna Hogg; Starring: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade. Cert 15, 115 mins

Joanna Hogg is one of the few current British directors whose work is instantly recognisable.

She makes forensic, minutely observed dramas about (to put it crudely) posh folk. Hogg is relentless in the way she probes into the lives of seemingly confident and privileged characters, exposing their vulnerabilities, prejudices and what she has described as “the inner mechanisms” of their minds and hearts. Her films have humorous and satirical elements but are often very bleak indeed.

Hogg’s latest feature, The Souvenir – screening this week at the Berlin Film Festival after its premiere in Sundance – is exceptional. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, it is a very dark romance that is all the more devastating because of the very British restraint with which its story is told. The film has a superb performance from newcomer Honor Swinton Byrne (whose mother Tilda Swinton also appears) as the ingenuous young film student in a destructive relationship with an older man.

The setting is London in the early 1980s. This is the era of the Libyan embassy siege and of the IRA planting bombs in Harrods. It’s a time of unemployment, inflation and social and political discord. Not that the characters here seem affected by what is going on around them. As in most of Hogg’s films, they are upper middle-class types who exist in a bubble.

Julie (Swinton Byrne​) is in her early twenties. She is pale skinned and softly spoken but her shyness belies her ambition. “I feel as if I don’t want to live my whole life in this very privileged part of the world,” she says at one stage. She may have a flat in Knightsbridge but she is planning to make a feature set in Sunderland.

Her older boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke) works for the Foreign Office, or claims he does. He is cultured, worldly wise, a bit debauched and not as well off as his extravagant lifestyle suggests.

The title of the film comes from an 18th century painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard held in the Wallace Collection and showing a young woman carving the initials of her lover into the bark of a tree.

Hogg shoots in her customary detached style, often filming characters from oblique angles, sideways, or from behind, or reflected on mirrors, rather than head on.

The tension mounts as Anthony’s behaviour becomes ever more erratic. He may dress in smartly tailored suits, stripy shirts and custom-made slippers but he is skint. “Lend me a tenner,” he keeps on asking his young girlfriend. She, in turn, begs money from her mother (played by Tilda Swinton), telling her she needs it for camera equipment for her film. The mother is a tweedy, home counties matron but one with surprisingly progressive views.

One of the incidental pleasures of the film is that it is set in an analogue era. There are no mobile phones or iPads. The characters here listen to music all the time but on vinyl or cassette. A very rich and eclectic Eighties soundtrack includes everything from Robert Wyatt’s elegiac “Shipbuilding” to songs by The Fall, The Pretenders and Jona Lewie. There is opera, jazz and classical music, too.

The Souvenir is also packed with references to other movies. Julie is a precocious young film student so it is little surprise that she knows her Psycho inside out. Anthony is a fervent admirer of Powell and Pressburger and of screwball comedies like It Happened One Night. The relationship between them is similar to that between Ingrid Bergman or Joan Fontaine and the older men in films like Rebecca or Voyage to Italy. She is a little naive. He is a mysterious and saturnine figure.

The film shows Julie with her fellow students at the film school and then with Anthony. It’s as if she is living in two completely separate worlds. Burke plays Anthony with subtlety, catching his raffishness and his charisma but also his leech-like neediness. “You’re not normal, you’re a freak ... you’re lost and you will always be lost,” he tells her but he could just as well be describing himself. There’s a hint of Jane Eyre’s Rochester or Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff about him, albeit he is a druggier version of such archetypes.

The pivotal scene here comes when Julie meets Anthony’s cynical friend, Patrick (Richard Ayoade), and begins to see her lover from his perspective.

On one level, this is a conventional coming of age story. Julie needs life experience. She is an aspiring artist but one from such a pampered background that she has nothing worthwhile yet to express. Heartbreak and suffering is useful raw material. Swinton Byrne plays her as an ingenue who also has half an eye on the main chance.

Not that The Souvenir suggests at all that the lovers are exploiting one another. Their feelings appear entirely sincere. They make a likeable and well-matched couple in spite of their age difference. They’ll be discussing aesthetics one moment and arguing over who sleeps in which half of the bed the next.

It’s typical of Hogg that the lovers keep up appearances and make small talk even as their relationship begins to rot. Key moments tend to happen off screen. The characters seldom express directly what they are feeling but the rawness of their feelings is evident. As Hogg reminds us yet again, class and privilege are never enough to ward off suffering.

The Souvenir will be released in the UK later in the year