Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir - Grand Passions and their Objects

If the only thing of note to come out of watching The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg's latest film, was a reminder of the existence of the Wallace Collection, I would have been content.  That the film is the strongest and most memorable that I've encountered this year is doubly rewarding. 

We'll always have Venice

The trigger for the film’s central and corrosive relationship between Julie, a young film student, and the older Anthony - louche, mysterious and addicted to heroin - is a postcard featuring one of the Wallace Collection's many paintings, Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Souvenir.  In the realm of art as seduction it seemed to me an obscure and slight choice – it was no Rokeby Venus – but perhaps its low-key and enigmatic nature gave it a particular power.  It quickly reeled me in, and I'd decided that I would return to the Marylebone art gallery even before Julie and Anthony had consummated their relationship.  Before that, though, there was the film.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Souvenir

It is a slow-burning masterpiece: atmospheric, haunting and – I've thought long and hard about this and I invite you to disagree – incredibly convincing.  Hogg's high-wire trick - aided by Honor Swinton-Byrne and Tom Burke's leads – is to portray a relationship that is horrific and toxic yet also enchanting and romantic.  Swinton-Byrne plays her part with a subtle mixture of naivety and strength, whilst in his movement and delivery, Tom Burke's Anthony has a definite touch of the Withnail about him: selfish and insouciant, and then, suddenly, as pennies drop, concerned and remorseful.

I adored the film's aesthetic.  Hogg's palette shies away from the garish, kitschy glitz of 1980s London and has a sombre sheen: greens and blues punctured occasionally by dazzling shimmers of fleeting luxury.  The film's soft focus poster, screaming Merchant Ivory at you, is indicative of those fugitive moments of bliss.  A trip to the Venetian opera provides the subject for the poster, and there's a cliched – yet still stunning – shot of the sinking city in the twilight.  However, in a clear allusion to Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now the camera’s sinks down to below the waterline and we're aware that those absent demons are close by.       

Tom Burke and Honor Swinton-Byrne as Anthony and Julie

Finally, the soundtrack is a joy.  Period pieces tend to be saddled with the obvious.  But not here.  In the film's first half hour we get Joe Jackson's 'Is She Really Going Out With Him', The Fall's 'Totally Wired' and Robert Wyatt's peerless 'Shipbuilding'.  The latter's lyrical coda about how we 'are diving for dear life, when we should be diving for pearls' is about the Falkland's War, but it also serves as the perfect summation of The Souvenir's central romance.

And so to the Wallace Collection a few days later, slightly ashamed that it had taken a film to provoke a further visit.  I have been twice before, once as a student nearly 20 years ago, and once to offer support for an exhibition hosted by my friend Jaime Bautista who runs the charity SMArt (an organisation that endeavours to get the socially marginalised and homeless back on their feet through art ... do check them out here).  The phrase treasure-trove is perfect for the Collection.  Housed in a huge Georgian townhouse in the centre of London,  it brims with art, antiques and curios.  There is almost too much to look at.  I wanted to search out the Fragonard though and, ignoring the foldout guide which would have steered me too swiftly to the exact location, I sauntered slowly from room to room, eyes stalking each wall. 

The Wallace Collection - yes, there's a few Rembrandts included!

Struggling to locate it I began to fear that it might have been loaned out.  Eventually, as I passed into the study, it appeared.  Tiny, around eight inches in length, it nestled between an eighteenth century dresser and a larger Fragonard entitled A Young Scholar.  My initial thoughts: delicate, exquisite, but perhaps unremarkable and easy to overlook.  A young girl carving initials onto a tree as a spaniel looks on.  Would it shed any light on the film, though, or would it reveal itself as sphinx without a secret?  I suspected the latter and a cursory look suggested that this was the case.  I enjoyed the soft shimmering pink folds of the girl's dress and the adjective ‘sentimental’ swam unsurprisingly into my mind.    

Picking up the guide to this room's particular booty told me more.  Rather than a random lovelorn woman, we were looking at Rousseau's Julie from his novel Julie, or the New Heloise.  That work's epistolary nature could give us an angle on the postcard, and Rousseau's broader philosophical message of authenticity over morality, perhaps, allowed us a glimpse of Anthony's spurious attempt to signpost or justify his horrid behaviour.  That said, if you are going to tell your true-love massive lies in order to feed a destructive drug-habit, it's going to take more than a bit of art based sophistry to sustain your relationship.  And that certainly doesn't check Rousseau's box for authenticity. 

Loving the wallpaper

Which is all a rather dry and academic reduction of a wonderful film.  No, I favoured something different, something simpler.  All grand passions need symbols, ones that both parties are aware of.  Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy have 'the little phrase from the Vinteuil Sonata', Rick and Isla have 1940s Paris, and Anthony and Julie have this sweet little painting.  The appeal of the object, therefore, is subjective.  Prior to the film, I would not have given this painting a second glance, but just as Julie is introduced to it through the prism of her nascent and burgeoning attraction to Anthony, encountering it initially in such a wonderful film gives it a bewitching and unique power.  It is certainly serving the Wallace Collection well which has invested in a stack of postcards of the painting that are stacked up in the gift shop.

There is so much more to say about this film.  It leaves you with countless unanswered questions.  Does Anthony actually have a job as some kind of spy with the FCO?  Is there another story going on involving him with the IRA and terrorism?  How much of herself does Hogg invest in the character of Julie?  The film lingers and stays with you, sending you scampering off to the Wallace Collection to try and learn more.  Beyond all those unanswered questions, though, you are left with a strange and uncompromising love story, one that like a lover's initial scratched onto a tree etches itself indelibly onto your mind.