Part II is a sublimely designed and cleverly observed scene ★★★★☆

‘I want to film life as I imagine it, not life as it happens.’ In an attempt to explain her unfinished screenplay with the rather pretentious subtitle ‘Art is Life’ to her teachers, London film student Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) doesn’t fare any better. The teachers doubt she will ever graduate.

But Julie knows what she wants better than those around her. And she keeps her word. ‘Life as I imagine it’ is an excellent description of the content of her graduation film. It’s also a good summary of The Souvenir: Part IIthe film that sees Joanna Hogg return to the past she portrayed in the critically acclaimed The Souvenir (2019) began to expose in its own unique way.

The films – set up as a diptych from the start – are autobiographical, but also imaginative, dreamy, jumpy. It is never clear what really happened and what didn’t. In The Souvenir (for those who haven’t seen it yet, check it out, it will be shown again in several cinemas this week) Julie begins her film school training in the 1980s and has an affair with the older, charming Anthony, behind whose mysterious behavior a heroin addiction.

The Souvenir: Part II It’s all about picking up the shards. Anthony is dead and Julie, raised in a sheltered environment in a very wealthy environment, has to face that she can no longer live as a spectator. Once again, she borrows money from her mother (Tilda Swinton, also Swinton Byrne’s mother in reality), but this time she feels the obligation that entails.

Hogg slowly draws the viewer into the story, insofar as there is a story: as a filmmaker, she is more of a painter than a writer. Each scene is a sublimely designed and cleverly observed scene, carefully strung on a chain like a bead. The result is a beautifully presented memory, so delicate and yet so powerful that it could only have happened this way, and no other way.