Review: Joanna Hogg’s ‘The Souvenir’ is a filmmaker’s exquisitely moving self-portrait
LA TimesFilm Critic At the start of Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical drama, “The Souvenir,” we hear a young filmmaker outlining her first feature: a grotty working-class narrative set in the shipyards of Sunderland, a city in the North of England. But you also feel it in the evocative details that Hogg tucks in lovingly throughout, from the stuffed animals in Julie’s bed to the old-school editing machine she uses to cut spools of film. At one point, Anthony and Julie visit an art gallery and study Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting “The Souvenir,” which depicts a young, pink-frocked woman, also named Julie, as she carves her lover’s initials into the trunk of a tree. If “The Souvenir” seems to move assuredly to its own unconventional rhythms, it’s because Hogg isn’t telling a straightforward story; she’s showing us, piecemeal, how an artist’s sensibility comes into being.
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