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12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 29 SEPTEMBER 2019 FILM FILM BETWEEN Almodovar's Pain and Glory (reviewed in these pages just last week) and now Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir, it appears as though September 2019 is keen to etch itself as the month for autobiographical explorations of film-makers' lives, albeit ones at the oppo- site poles of the age spectrum. Though indulgent in some ways, the sub-genre of the film- maker's introspective look at what makes their own practice tick (it would be styled kun- stlerroman for novels) is also potentially a decent-enough groundwork to explore univer- sal themes. And the very disparity of age in the protagonists/film-mak- ers' stand-ins in the examples above hint at what it can all be about. While Almodovar tack- les present-day concerns of old resentments coming to the fore and physical health waning in latter-day years, Hogg takes a pained and cringing journey back to her film-school years, during which time she also found herself entangled in a truly yikes-inducing, red-flag- prompting relationship with a charismatic but deeply suspi- cious older man who claimed to have worked for the Foreign Office. Her own avatar is Julie, played with disarming vulnerability by Honor Swinton-Byrne, the daughter to British thespian lu- minary Tilda Swinton, who al- so shows up here to play moth- er to her daughter's fictional iteration. Ensconced in the privileged trappings of a plush property in Knightsbridge, London during the 1980s – with the looming threat of IRA car bombs apt to go off at any moment – Julie sub-lets the apartment bequeathed to her while trying to put together a film on the poverty-stricken port city of Sunderland as part of her course work. At a party, she meets the quietly charming Anthony (Tom Burke), whose patrician air and bluntly hon- est, though oddly sensitive and perceptive, observations of her and her own work gradually lead to a more sustained rela- tionship. Noting an opportuni- ty to insert himself further into Julie's life when he overhears that her tenant will be going away for a few days, Anthony effectively moves in for good. But all is not as it seems, even if Julie appears too blind to read the signs at first. Anybody even vaguely fa- miliar with Hogg's oeuvre will know that she's not one for rapid-fire, rat-a-tat storytell- ing. But her incisive character studies are always quietly com- pelling experiences, particular- ly in their ability to eviscerate the pretensions and neuroses of her own social class of ori- gin. Here, however, the work is shaded with additional depth and a rich canvas of pain, as Hogg turns the scalpel on her- self. That's not to say that this is some morbid, sadomasochis- tic exercise, either. We follow Julie's fatal mistakes across ter- rain that is new to her in every respect. She is feeling her way through dangerous and – for her – unprecedented territory in a relationship she does not yet realise is a minefield, while also latching on to an artistic subject that may be motivated by outwardly good intentions but is clearly not the most hon- est pathway for her as an artist. Whereas Hogg's previous output may have intrigued us by giving us a fly-on-the-wall view of the lives of people we may not usually be able to fre- quent or familiarise ourselves with, lacing the pill with sa- Executively produced by Martin Scorsese, British director Joanna Hogg's raw but expertly stage-managed mining of her own past makes for sumptuous and deliciously discomfiting viewing Teodor Reljic Portrait of the artist as a young woman: Honor Swinton-Byrne is Julie, an autobiographical stand-in for a twentysomething version of writer-director Joanna Hogg The art of instructive mistakes