This year’s two big breakup movies – The Souvenir and Marriage Story – are also stories of privilege. Reaction to both polarised accordingly; for many people, it’s simply hard to care if someone is sobbing in a pied-à-terre near Harrods.
For me, the specificity of both stories – and the sad lack of dovetailing with my own finances – did not prove a problem. And you don’t get more specific than The Souvenir: Joanna Hogg’s immaculate resurrection of her life as a film school student in the early 1980s, living in Knightsbridge and having an affair with a man here called Anthony: older, works for the Foreign Office (probably), louche, learned, persuasive, confident – and a heroin addict.
Julie (AKA young Joanna) is played by Hogg’s goddaughter, Honor Swinton Byrne; and her mother by Honor’s mum, Tilda Swinton. The set is an inch-perfect recreation of Hogg’s old flat, down to her gilt bed. Tom Burke wears the silk bow-ties the man that he’s playing wore and someone who knew both of them was apparently too shaken by the similarity to speak to Hogg after a screening.
For me, the film’s power comes from this summoning of ghosts. Burke inhabits a man so completely and compellingly you continue to feel his ghastly, charming hold long after the credits roll. Neither the actor nor Hogg seemed, at the time of the UK release at least, to realise the supreme spookiness of this. But it means seeing The Souvenir is like living through a fairytale nightmare, driven by a parasite – and directed by a genius.
The Souvenir isn’t yet making a scratch in awards season which is the sort of bananas fact that shows up the whole hoo-hah for the mad sham it is. But it’s introduced the US to Hogg, at least, and given all of us an indelible masterpiece – whether we like it or not. If you can’t see past the postcode, it’s probably your loss.
