shakahislop
Well-known member
saw the souvenir last night. i think basically these kind of films are a bit boring, it's hard to write something about a film like that in a thread called 'films you've seen recently and would highly recommend' without mentioning that these things are essentially boring. that's the whole point i think, that they are slow and non-entertaining and as a result they do something to you on an affective level. so obviously i liked it, and i liked archipelago too. she sort of lets you look at these english middle class social worlds and i think she gets it bang on.i watched archipelago on dvd. i was prepared for this to be a bit irritating, but i actually found myself really loving it. never seen anything by joanna hogg before but i like how she films everything in this, all very much from a distance (COS THE FAMILY ARE ALL SO DISTANT GEDDIT - well thats maybe why, but what i liked about it was that it wasnt all emotionally cold like i expected despite all the silences) and very still, and as a nice link to the painter character, its all v picaresque. made me think i was watching a european director actually, or a european landscape almost, but its not. lots of good observations on the family dynamic too, as well as a broader drama/examination of m/c manners/behaviour (the restaurant scene is classic and could so so easily have been mined for laughs but its actually got a strange sort of beauty about it), but never cliched, which is what made it seem so fresh to me. the thing that let it down i thought were the scenes with the cook and the painter, not cos theyre not interesting, the conversations are actually some of the most interesting of the whole film, but they kind of undo the sort of tense atmosphere of the rest of the scenes as they seem really docu-like, its like the cook and painter are just acting as themselves, which was a bit TOO naturalistic and unaffected, borderline reality-tv-seeming actually, esp in contrast to the acting by tom hiddleston and his sister (who are both really good). i recommend it anyway. def going to search out the other film joanna hogg made.
with the souvenir the best thing about it is being able to hang out in i think the late 1970s. there's something really tactile, physical, screenless about that world. it's nice to be immersed in a kind of recognisable but also comprehensively gone version of england. there's also these echoes of an almost victorian old england in it, her mum and dad for example, which are even more comprehensively gone. the way that she shows how men and women interacted was pretty useful for understanding uk middle class feminism now i think. coz the way that men and women interact in the film is what they are / were fighting against. all of the small ways that the men in the film assume superiority over her, the way she accepts it, her comparative lack of confidence, the ways she's talked down to, despite that fact that she's the one with all the money and the power that brings