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| Honor Swinton Byrne and Tom Burke in The Souvenir |
From the moment we hear the George Sanders purr of Tom Burke's voice, we know that the character he's playing is a bit of a cad and that the slightly awkward and slightly androgynous Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) should be on her guard. But as it turns out, Julie gets the best of a relationship in which he's mostly in it for her (or her family's) money. She gets the experience she will need to become a filmmaker. The Souvenir ends with the promise of a "Part II," which is not what we usually expect of our arty, thoughtful movies these days, but which is probably something of a necessity to complete the thoughts that Joanna Hogg implants with this semi-autobiographical story, drawn from her own early days as a film student. The callow Julie has a big idea: make a serious drama about an impoverished working-class boy growing up with a sick mother in a blighted British industrial city. Considering that she's from a family that's anything but impoverished and working-class, she's advised that she should stick to what she knows. But since she doesn't know much of anything about life, that's a problem. Hogg was a late bloomer as a filmmaker: She made her first feature film, Unrelated, in 2007, when she was 47. The Souvenir is a reflection on coming of age in Thatcherite Britain, and it forms part of a slowly growing corpus of films about British artists and intellectuals that demonstrate Hogg's mature and melancholy vision of the state of the world.
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