Hogg, Joanna

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    ‘The Eternal Daughter’ Review: Two Glorious Sides of Tilda Swinton

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    The actress astonishes in two roles in Joanna Hogg’s haunting film set in a creaky castle in Wales.“The Eternal Daughter,” a lovely and haunted dream of a movie from the director of “The Souvenir,” opens on a spectral scene at dusk. On a desolate country road shrouded in fog and bordered by bare trees, sounds of the wind and lonely music drift on the soundtrack as spindly branches reach across the frame like fingers. By the time taxi headlights pierce the fog, your head may be churning with thoughts of ghosts and fanged demons, the kind that emerge from the shadows in old horror films to trouble your sleep.I imagine that the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg has a passing acquaintance with some of those movies, even if her work is rarefied enough to constitute its own auteurist genre. “The Souvenir,” which brought Hogg a wider audience, is a memory piece about a young woman’s devastating first love. The tragedy is crushingly sad, even if its conclusion is foregone. What gives it and other of Hogg’s movies their power aren’t their stories per se but her distinctive style and how she elicits meaning with emotional intimacy and intellectual reserve, creating realism from silences, gazes and rooms that become worlds.There are two women passengers in the taxi, a middle-aged filmmaker, Julie, and her mother, Rosalind, along with the mother’s dog, Louis, a soulful springer spaniel. The women are striking, dressed in understated clothing that quietly announces their privileged station before either speaks a word. Julie is talking to the driver while Rosalind seems to be sleeping, a gloved hand resting on Louis. Julie’s hair is auburn, her face pale and lightly creased, while Rosalind seems washed in gray. They make a vivid, arresting pair, all the more so because both characters are played by an astonishing Tilda Swinton.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.Julie and Rosalind are in Wales for a brief visit. They’re staying in a rambling hotel, an imposing, 18th-century mansion topped with gables and stone heraldic beasts. There are different reasons that mother and daughter are traveling together, including nearby relations, an impending birthday and a potential film project. As Julie explains later, during a conversation with a sympathetic caretaker, Bill (Joseph Mydell), one of the few other people around, she has come to the hotel to try and write a film about her and her mother. But she’s having trouble getting started. “I’m not sure that I feel I have a right to do such a thing.”Not much happens at first beyond Julie’s amusingly testy, politely antagonistic exchange at check-in with the hotel receptionist (a dryly funny Carly-Sophia Davies). The women settle into their room, a cozy double lined with toile wallpaper and furnished with separate beds and some strategically placed mirrors that Hogg soon has wicked fun with. Mother and daughter are close, though Julie’s doting on Rosalind isn’t always welcome. Rosalind spends a lot of time in bed; she also seems untroubled by the mansion’s eerie noises, its spooky gloom and the loud rhythmic banging that keeps Julie up at night.Given Hogg’s interest in memory and her expressionistic use of space it was perhaps inevitable that she’d make a ghost story, though “The Eternal Daughter” doesn’t as much conform to the genre template as playfully nip at its edges. It’s not for nothing that the first words you hear are “well, there was something strange….” Yet while Hogg comes at genre obliquely, she also makes great use of horror’s greatest hits by deploying creaking doors, billowing curtains and ominous shadows. And then there’s the pale-gray face at a window that Julie sees at night while out walking the dog.The mother and daughter, their differences, similarities, tenderness and love are the story, which Hogg fills in with chatter, reminiscences, precise details, private rituals and lingering looks. You see how Julie methodically, and with a hint of odd urgency, unpacks her luggage, and how Rosalind daintily removes a tablet from a pillbox. And while you may shriek in mock-horror at some mother-daughter passive-aggression — “What do you think, Mum?” Julie asks of Rosalind, who answers “What do you think?” — Hogg doesn’t peel away the character’s psychological layers. Their mysteries, as she will tenderly reveal, lie elsewhere.Notable effort has gone into visually distinguishing Julie and Rosalind beyond just their hair and clothes, including the use of some discreet makeup and careful lensing. Even so, the characters look more conspicuously alike than not, a resemblance that underlines their bonds, familial and otherwise, even as it evokes the figure of the doppelgänger, another horror staple. In classic examples, the doppelgänger serves as a sinister, even monstrous double (Dr. Jekyll, meet Mr. Hyde). Here, the doubling can be subtle, but it does suggest that there are alternative realities in play, an idea that Hogg conveys early on with some clever, destabilizing mirrored images — something definitely weird this way comes.Hogg’s greatest stroke in “The Eternal Daughter” is her casting of Swinton in both lead roles. Swinton is a wonderful chameleon and while she can go as big and showy as any Oscar contender, she is also a brilliant miniaturist. Swinton gives Julie and Rosalind fine-grained differences, individual gestures and gaits, puts elasticity into Julie’s voice and a light huskiness in Rosalind’s. Julie is more robust than her mother, and her expressions are bigger, too, more animated. Julie seems outwardly directed while Rosalind — with her still and watchful gaze — seems in retreat, as if she’d begun collapsing inward.The effect can be uncanny, particularly when mother and daughter are face to face at dinner. Hogg shows off the room at one point, the camera panning over the museological furnishings, but for the dinner sequences she primarily shoots Julia and Rosalind in individual medium close up, cutting back and forth between them. This allows you to see the warmth between the women, how they spark off each other, and to fully absorb their differences — the eagerness in one face, the exhaustion in the other. It’s like looking at two stages of the moon, one waxing and the other waning. And, if you’re wondering where the ghost is, let me whisper a clue: Nothing haunts us as deeply, as memorably, as love.The Eternal DaughterRated PG-13. For eek, a ghost! Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      When Women Filmmakers Get to Tell Their Origin Stories

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      Movies about men who make movies are common, but female auteurs don’t often get such chances. That’s just one reason two new releases are so surprising.The newly released “The Souvenir Part II” and “Bergman Island” are both films by modern masters that not only delve into the filmmaking process but also draw from the personal lives of the filmmakers themselves.Sound familiar? Self-reflexive movies like these practically double as auteurist rites of passage — think “8 ½,” Federico Fellini’s beguiling ode to creative block with Marcello Mastroianni playing a version of the filmmaker; “Day for Night,” François Truffaut’s chaotic comedy about artistic collaboration starring Truffaut himself in the on-camera director’s chair; and, more recently, “Pain and Glory,” Pedro Almodóvar’s melodrama about an aging filmmaker (Antonio Banderas) in crisis. The list goes on, but with the newest films, there’s a crucial distinction: the masters in question are women.Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II” and Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island” revolve around two women filmmakers, avatars for the directors, navigating their desires, relationships and creative pursuits in ways that fully reinvigorate the self-referential genre. Spotlighting the intellectual doubts and processes of two very different types of women, these films also raise subtle questions about gender disparity in the movie business and the unique ways in which women artists come into their own. And refreshingly, these films never dabble in obvious, self-congratulatory screeds about sexism — theirs is a magic much more potent and revelatory.“The Souvenir Part II” is the follow-up to Hogg’s 2019 drama about a soft-spoken student filmmaker who falls into a fraught and ultimately tragic romance with an alluring heroin addict. The new movie again draws generously from Hogg’s early years attending the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England. Still reeling from her lover’s death, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) must build herself back up. The demands of completing her thesis film — a relationship drama based on her memories, that is, the events of the first film — propel her to become a more self-assured individual, transformed by the cathartic powers of creative work. In the end, the presentation of Julie’s finished film doubles as a plunge into her subconscious, a Technicolor fantasia akin to the deliriously joyous endings of golden age movie musicals and a brilliant shorthand for the marriage of art and life.In the press notes, Hogg said that despite being “terribly introverted” in film school, she had “a very clear idea of where I wanted to go, so I was able to blank out the voices, usually of men, that said ‘you can’t do a film like that.’”Indeed, we see Julie contend with skepticism from her own cast and crew, sharing their doubts about her directorial style behind her back or directly to her face in one particularly blustery spat initiated by a boorish male colleague. In conversation with an academic advising committee, Julie must stand her ground in the face of dubious filmmaking veterans accustomed to certain rigid practices.Hogg’s methods are highly improvisatory — her scripts contain little dialogue and are instead filled with descriptions, references to particular memories and images that might encourage ad-libbing and a more organic kind of creation.Now 61, and decades into her career, Hogg has room to experiment. Though she’s not exactly working on expensive and elaborate studio films, she enjoys privileges and leeway not typically afforded to female directors.Vicky Krieps, left, and Tim Roth are a filmmaking couple in Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island.”IFC Films, via Associated PressTo this day the word “auteur” brings to mind a boy’s club. Consider how new films by male directors labeled visionaries like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, or Wes Anderson are treated as events. The cult of male genius more pertinently extends to the kinds of money, time and space given for such so-called genius to flourish. Correcting the gender imbalance in the film industry isn’t just a matter of creating more opportunities for women — in effect meeting quotas — but believing in the unique visions of women artists and robustly investing in the cultivation of those visions.Hogg and Hansen-Love are hardly the only women filmmakers to get personal and explore the emotional twists and turns in getting a new movie off the ground. The work of the provocateur Catherine Breillat often has an autobiographical bent. Her “Abuse of Weakness” (2014) starred Isabelle Huppert as a filmmaker who experiences a stroke, as Breillat did, and in “Sex Is Comedy” (2004), the director restaged the behind-the-scenes drama leading up to the filming of one of her most infamous sex scenes. Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” (1997) starred the director as a video store worker struggling to make a documentary about a forgotten actress from the 1930s. The recent restoration and release of “The Watermelon Woman” certainly helped pull Dunye’s ingenious autofiction out of obscurity. Nevertheless portraits of female filmmakers aren’t exactly well known or particularly numerous.The discrepancies between the way male and female filmmakers are treated are put under a magnifying glass in “Bergman Island.” Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), directors both, retreat to the island where Ingmar Bergman shot several of his films in order to focus independently on their new scripts. Mia Hansen-Love, who was in a 15-year relationship with the filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Irma Vep,” “Personal Shopper”), shows Chris procrastinating and suffering from extreme writer’s block, while Tony diligently fills page after page of his notebook with sexually questionable material. Ah, to be an auteur! As Chris, riddled with self-doubt, wastes time exploring the island on her own terms, the more well-known Tony hosts public Q. and A.’s and fields compliments from devoted fans. And when Chris finally shares the details of her latest idea for a movie, Tony seems distracted.No matter, Hansen-Love seems to say. If not Tony, the audience will be fully captivated by Chris’s dream world. A film-within-a-film unfolds, a sweltering romance between a younger couple (Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie) that also takes place on Faro Island and seems to reconfigure Chris’s frustrations and anxieties into new and visceral form.Both “Bergman Island” and “The Souvenir Part II” show an intimate understanding of art’s liberating potential, the power that fiction and fantasy afford individuals still in search of themselves. These aren’t exclusively female ventures — anyone who understands what it means to be diminished and looked down upon will find solace in the possibility of an alternative, an outlet for self-expression that transforms trauma and fear and insecurity into a source of fulfillment and strength.Crucially, Julie and Chris aren’t shown reveling in the success of their films, getting revenge on their male skeptics, or landing multimillion-dollar deals. Their triumphs are private, premised as they are on the satisfaction of creating something true and beautiful in spite of their vulnerable creators — Chris falls asleep in Bergman’s study and awakens in the future as her own film shoot comes to a close, her husband’s approval and the towering cinematic figure so central to her artistic development a twinkle in the past. We’re in her territory now. More

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      A Filmmaking Life Gets a Sequel

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      Joanna Hogg is the rare director to be given the greenlight for a two-part drama about finding her own voice. She’s only been thinking about it since 1988.Sequels and spinoffs and origin stories fill the multiplexes, but it’s vanishingly rare to see two feature-length dramas centered on the same, real-world character. Enter “The Souvenir,” two films directed by Joanna Hogg on a subject that’s also not common onscreen: a young woman finding her way in life and coming into her own.In “The Souvenir,” released in 2019, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a film school student in 1980s London. Her relationship with Anthony, a witty, debonair older man, goes off the rails as it emerges that he’s addicted to heroin. “The Souvenir Part II,” which opens Oct. 29, follows a solo Julie working out her voice as a person and as a director — a new rich chapter of experience where a single film might have declared “The End.”“You don’t normally have that opportunity with the story, to have a break in the middle and think about what you’re doing and approach things differently the second way,” Hogg said in an interview at a downtown hotel the day after her movie’s New York Film Festival premiere last month. (Part II takes place only a few days after Part I but was shot two years later.)Until recently, her films have been like a much-beloved secret. “Joanna Hogg — where have you been all my movie-loving life?” Manohla Dargis wrote when the director’s first three features were finally released in the United States in 2014. A.O. Scott called the first part “an absolute joy to watch.” Distributed by the brand-savvy A24, “The Souvenir Part II” is the latest entry in Hogg’s ardently admired oeuvre.Her fans include Ari Aster, director of “Midsommar,” who said in an email, “At her best, she lends a subtle, deeply individual strangeness to the quotidian.” He praised her as “a fastidious and texture-obsessed diarist in the best sense.” Another fan: President Barack Obama, who counted “Part I” among his favorite movies of 2019.The Scottish novelist Ali Smith (“Summer”), who once screened Hogg’s work in an arts festival, said via email, “Her films are beautiful things in the world, and witty, hyper-intelligent, scalpel-sharp, simultaneously merciless and deeply humane.” Smith added, “She takes class apart, she has a clear eye across the traditions that skewer us or vitalize us.”Julie’s story draws closely on Hogg’s memories. Like Julie, Hogg studied filmmaking in the 1980s, at the National Film and Television School, and dated a devastatingly charming man with an all-consuming drug addiction. And Julie’s background, like Hogg’s, is solidly upper middle class. Visits to the country home of Julie’s parents punctuate both films; artifacts, clothing and photos from Hogg’s life appear throughout, too. “Part I” broaches the notion of privilege, as Julie faces teachers skeptical of her initial proposal to make a film about a struggling port city. “Part II” sees her coming out of her shell and, as Hogg put it, “joining the world, joining life.”Honor Swinton Byrne, left, and Tilda Swinton in “The Souvenir Part II.”Sandro Kopp/A24Hogg went onto a career in British television and did not direct her first theatrical feature until 2007 at age 47: “Unrelated,” starring Tom Hiddleston, also making his feature debut. “The Souvenir Part II” imagines a different trajectory for Julie, giving her a freedom Hogg did not have at the time.“I didn’t get to make a film at film school that spoke about the relationship that I’d been in,” the director said. Friendly and low-key in a subdued dark top and pants, she chose her words firmly but with a dry, winningly modest sense of understatement that would fit without a rustle right into a Joanna Hogg film. “It was important for her to be less naïve and therefore more in control of her life and therefore her story.”The ties of friends and family are further entwined through Hogg’s cast. The director knew Swinton Byrne as the daughter of an old schoolmate, Tilda Swinton. (Hogg is Swinton Byrne’s godmother.) Swinton starred in Hogg’s real graduate film, “Caprice,” and plays Julie’s doting mother in both parts of “The Souvenir.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Yet Swinton Byrne was cast less than a month before shooting on “Part I” began. Hogg was visiting Swinton about playing Julie’s mother but still didn’t have a Julie.“I was getting onto a train to go back to London, and Honor was arriving from London coming home,” Hogg said. The two chatted on the platform about “what it is to be in your early 20s,” and for Hogg it just “clicked.”“I feel like I was very like Julie when I was a bit younger. You know how insecure it is,” Swinton Byrne, 23, said, bubbly over the phone from Edinburgh, where she’s studying psychology after a teaching stint in Namibia, among other things. (“My mom says that I’m still not fully baked yet,” she said, laughing.)Swinton Byrne’s Julie reckons with the past in “The Souvenir Part II” but spends a lot of time on a soundstage, leading her crew and explaining motivations to her actors. (Her classmates include a hilariously biting Richard Ayoade.)Hogg “dramatizes the fragmentary life of the imagination, completing a story that was full of hesitations in the first place,” the critic Molly Haskell said in an email, invoking Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. “To my mind, the only remotely analogous cinematic experiment of recent years is Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ trilogy.”Hogg’s two-part idea — which she dates at least to a journal entry in 1988 — wasn’t a sure thing. She had planned to shoot both films at the same time, until a financier pulled out. Another twist involved Robert Pattinson, who was slated for a role (later reworked) in “Part II” but was tied up with “Tenet” instead. (No hard feelings from Hogg: “I hope that I’ll work with him in the future.”)“I wanted desperately to make them at the same time, because I thought there was a danger that if I just made the first one, I wouldn’t get the opportunity to make the second one,” Hogg recalled.Today, she is grateful for the extra time and even believes the second part would have been “a shadow of its current self” if she’d shot both movies together.It’s easy to see this ability to adapt and find an alchemy in the shifts of reality as part of her filmmaking style. Despite her movies’ precise ear for the spoken word, Hogg doesn’t write traditional screenplays, giving actors the space to come up with dialogue. She lets scenes unfold at length, often with room-wide shots that allow us to soak in the give-and-take.One tragicomic sequence in her “Archipelago,” starring Hiddleston, observes a family dither dysfunctionally over where to sit at a restaurant. (“Never has the term ‘faffing about’ been so perfectly illustrated,” the critic Jonathan Romney wrote approvingly in The Independent.)Alex Heeney, who co-wrote a monograph about Joanna Hogg, told me, “Hogg’s films are less about duration than they are about how people orbit each other and how their spaces facilitate or prevent this.” In “The Souvenir,” she added, Julie “has to work to become the protagonist in her own life, and that’s not taken lightly.”Hogg is already editing her next film “The Eternal Daughter,” a ghost story starring Swinton. In the meantime, Hogg’s “Souvenir” star, Swinton Byrne, seemed still to be reflecting on her character’s two-part journey.“It is like watching a friend get up on her feet after a really intense breakup or intense loss,” she said. “It’s what I waited for a long time, to see Julie, who I see as a friend, become a full person.” More

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      ‘The Souvenir Part II’ Review: Life, as She Imagines It

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      In the sequel to her art-house favorite “The Souvenir,” Joanna Hogg picks up the story of a young woman’s journey to becoming an artist.Deep into “The Souvenir Part II,” a young woman walks through a hall of mirrors as if in a dream. It is a freighted moment for the character, a film student whose lover died not long ago. After struggling with her grief and her art, she seems on the cusp of a creative breakthrough: She’s made her graduate movie and her mother, father and friends are there to see it. As she walks among her mirrored reflections, she also seems to be passing her many different selves — the dutiful daughter, the drifting student, the bereft survivor — now all in service to her role as an artist.The latest from the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg, “Souvenir Part II” is a portrait of a young artist. It’s about life and art, inspiration and process, growing and becoming. And while it is familiar in many ways, it also isn’t the usual bleating about art and artists partly because most such stories are about men, those tortured, mad geniuses whose work dominates culture, filling museums and biopics. This, by contrast, is the story of a recognizably faltering young woman who tells her disapproving male professors that her film will be about “life as I imagine it” — and then makes good on her statement of intent.“Part II” picks up more or less where Hogg’s 2019 art-house favorite “The Souvenir” ends. Set in Britain in the early 1980s, the first movie finds Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) in film school, generously supported by her parents. The story’s focus, though, and much of her energy and time are dedicated to her exciting, progressively fraught affair with an enigmatic dissembler, Anthony (Tom Burke), who charms, seduces and robs her. Ultimately, he overdoses on heroin in a bathroom of the museum where he showed her the Fragonard painting that gives the film its title. “Souvenir” ends with a snippet of romantic poetry and Julie walking off a soundstage into the day.That first story has its obvious attractions, notably the irresistible appeal of tragic love, with its messy beds and broken hearts. But it is Hogg’s filmmaking — her narrative and stylistic choices, the precision of her framing, the stillness of her images and how she withholds information — that distinguishes “Souvenir” and her other movies. She’s found her own way at the crossroads of art cinema and the mainstream, and particularly striking is how she handles time and transitions. Most filmmakers smooth out scenes so they seamlessly flow into a whole; Hogg likes to cut off songs, as if snapping off a radio, and abruptly shift from here to there — just as we do in life.When the sequel opens, Julie is lying in bed, back at her parents’ immaculately appointed country home. She’s still in mourning and still seeking refuge with her father, William (James Spencer Ashworth), and her mother, Rosalind (a brilliant Tilda Swinton, Swinton Byrne’s real mother). They’re slightly baffled by their daughter’s life but are kind, gentle and unflaggingly supportive. Back in her own world, Julie hangs out with her friends, spends time on other people’s film shoots and works on her grad project. She also tries to make sense of Anthony, his life and death, and the churning, complex feelings that he left in his wake. She misses the intimacy of the man she calls a “mysterious leader.”“Part II” misses him, too — specifically it misses Burke’s charisma and talent, which worked with Swinton Byrne’s awkward hesitancy in the first film, creating a friction that suited the dynamics of their characters’ relationship. Swinton Byrne presents a likable, sympathetic figure (you’re certainly drawn to the character), and has a jutting, sculptural face that demands your attention. But she isn’t skilled enough to create a persuasive inner life for Julie, and because Hogg avoids scripted exposition, her actress can’t lean on the dialogue to help fill in the blanks. Julie’s uncertainty, her doubts and mistakes are crucial to “Souvenir Part II,” but Swinton Byrne’s wan performance is an uninteresting placeholder for an idea.Eventually and with much stumbling, Julie’s grad film comes into focus; she begins shooting it, basing it on her relationship with Anthony. Embracing a rigorous fidelity to her past, she builds an exact replica of her flat and dresses the male lead in Anthony’s housecoat. Movies about moviemaking are rarely as interesting as their makers think, but Julie’s process does illuminate the character and Hogg’s autobiographical intentions. Julie frets, worries, changes her mind, confusing her actors and (understandably) infuriating her cinematographer. But all of these efforts go on far too long and Julie wears out your patience, as does Hogg’s emphasis on this belabored interlude.Even so, Hogg’s filmmaking presents its own forceful draw and is the reason I watched “Souvenir Part II” again. The second time, I paid closer attention to Julie’s grad film, a fantastical dream of a movie that is a very serious, amusingly arty pastiche of overwrought symbolism and cinematic allusions (“The Lady From Shanghai,” “The Red Shoes”). It’s poignantly terrible, but its badness is immaterial to Hogg’s project. Julie has tapped everything that she has — her images and experiences, her being, seeing, feeling — and in doing so she’s irrevocably blurred the divide between life and art. She lived, made her movie, and will keep on doing both in all the Joanna Hogg movies to come.The Souvenir Part IIRated R for language and adult sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      In-Person New York Film Festival Unveils Lineup

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      Opening with Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” the event will include the body horror tale “Titane” and the Harlem Renaissance adaptation “Passing.”The Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Titane,” about a serial killer with rather unorthodox sexual tastes, and the Sundance critical hit “Passing,” an adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance novel by Nella Larsen, are among the highlights of the 59th New York Film Festival, organizers announced on Tuesday.After last year’s virtual edition, screenings will be held in-person with proof of vaccination required, although there will be some outdoor and virtual events. (More details on pandemic protocols will be released in the coming weeks.)As previously announced, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s solo directing debut, will play opening night, Sept. 24. A take on the play by Shakespeare, it stars Denzel Washington in the title role and Frances McDormand, the director’s wife, as Lady Macbeth. The centerpiece of the festival will be “The Power of the Dog,” the first Jane Campion film in more than a decade, and “Parallel Mothers,” from Pedro Almodóvar, will be the closing-night title.The main slate will feature a mix of premieres and highlights from earlier festivals. The body horror tale “Titane” made headlines last month when its director, Julia Ducournau, became only the second woman (after Campion in 1993) to win Cannes’ top prize. Other titles from the French festival heading to New York include “Benedetta,” Paul Verhoeven’s 17th-century lesbian nun potboiler; “The Souvenir Part II,” Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama about a film student in 1980s London; and “The Velvet Underground,” Todd Haynes’s documentary about the band synonymous with Andy Warhol’s New York.From Sundance, “Passing,” directed by the actress Rebecca Hall, who adapted Larsen’s 1929 novel, stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as childhood friends who reconnect from opposite sides of the color line. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated “Flee,” which won the Sundance world cinema documentary prize, focuses on a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark.Other titles of note include Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth; the comic-drama “Hit the Road,” from Panah Panahi, son of the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi; and two films from the Korean director Hong Sangsoo, “In Front of Your Face” and “Introduction.”Passes are on sale now; tickets to individual films will go on sale Sept. 7. Go to filmlinc.org for more details. More