The Souvenir: Part II

If anybody has a handle on the domestic politics and emotional repression of the upper middle-classes, it's Joanna Hogg, who again captures the airless politeness of sunlit breakfast rooms with this, also semi-autobiographical, sequel to The Souvenir.

The film is structurally fascinating in places - breaking out into a stunning piece of experimentalism at one point - but it doesn't generate quite the sustained emotional pull of the original, which thrust us into the heart of young love and a dangerous relationship which ended with the death of film student Julie's (Honor Swinton-Byrne) boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke) to a heroin overdose.

This film deals with the aftermath, as Julie tries to grapple with her grief at the same time as putting together her graduation film that will act as "a memorial" to Anthony. Hogg has always had an eye for architectural as well as emotional spaces and we see it here, as she floods the large rooms of Julie's parents' home with light, so that she almost seems to be paling out of them, which, coupled with her often silent reactions as others babble around her makes it seem as though she is the one who might be the ghost. Later, she'll take us to a hall of imagined mirrors, reflecting back and again the multiple facets of a film in which a filmmaker (Hogg in the present day) is scrutinising the creative choices of her younger self via film at the same time as her younger self was also putting her own emotions under the microscope through movie making.

As with the first film, I loved the way Hogg captures the mother and daughter dynamic. When her mum (played by Swinton-Byrne's own mother Tilda, crumpling herself into dowdy middle-aged cardigans and sensible shoes) first talks about a piece of pottery she's made, her joy is in uncomfortable contrast to the self-absorption offered by Julie's muted response. Her daughter only realises the value of it when she accidentally breaks it some time later - in what is probably the most quietly devastating act to ever happen to a sugar bowl on film.

Although its in a completely different emotional register it shares with The Eyes Of Tammy Faye - out simultaneously - an interesting interplay between what is 'real' and what is 'constructed' when we consider events in our lives, which has a brilliant pay-off towards the end of the film. I struggled a fair bit with the talkier sections, though, when several film students – including Richard Ayoade, who is so well-known these days its hard to forget he's acting – are being self-absorbed simultaneously. It may be a genuine reflection of the truth but it almost grinds the film to a halt in one or two places. Thank goodness then for Swinton-Byrne's magnetic performance at its heart, often speaking volumes simply by not speaking at all, we watch her shift her focus from examining the past to becoming her future.