You're forcing me to have a tantrum

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's top 50 films of 2022

#29 : The Souvenir Part II 

Second half of Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical drama, with Honor Swinton Byrne as film student Julie as she abandons her social issue documentary in favour of making her own autobiographical memoir.

Well, after part I, I'm obviously desperate to watch this - I'd say the only way is up, but I'm not sure I really believe that.  Let's just hope it isn't any worse, eh?

Interestingly it starts at pretty much exactly the point that the last film ends which I wasn't expecting - and I think I'm safe telling you that was the death of Anthony, Julie's (Honor Swinton Byrne) dodgy geezer lover.  And it pretty much continues in the same vein as the first film, but she is less brooding and more of her own person in this film.  It all then gets extremely meta as she continues her work at film school and decides to make a film about her relationship - which means that this is a film about making a film about the relationship which the last film was about.  

Overall, it's a very similar style of film to the previous one, but I did prefer this one (I'm not saying I loved it though!).  In some ways it's a less interesting film because of the absence of Anthony who, despite his faults, was an interesting character but he did somewhat overwhelm the emotional drama of the last film.  His absence enables this one to be a bit more nuanced and Julie gets to do more what she wants to do - although it's not all that clear that she really knows what that is a lot of the time (and there's a good thirty minutes in the middle where she patently doesn't have a clue).  Overall, she does generally make more progress though so I found it more engaging and definitely less of a struggle than the last film - but everyone is still so earnest!

Once again, the film feels a lot like therapy for Joanna - although at least in this one she has the chance to show that she has made it out the other side.  As with the last one, she's very much not afraid to show her faults - it's awkward at times but you can't fault her honesty.  And, intriguingly, it's the second film in a row that I watched that ended with us cutting away from the scene to show us the sound stage (and it actually made more sense here than it did in the other one).

Honor delivers a similar performance to last time, but she does have more to work with this time.  We actually get to see more of her student friends this time as well (because she actually spends some time at college) - Jaygann Ayeh, Ariane Labed, Harris Dickinson and Joe Alwyn are all watchable.  Richard Ayaode is back with some terrible hair as a character with the same name as in the last film, but I'm really not sure if he's the same person (and also don't really care).  And we get to see Tilda for the third film in a row - she actually seems pretty normal in this (and you'd really hope she'd be able to act at being Honor's mum).  But she's only in two films from this year so she's going to be beaten by Tom Burke who appears in this (very briefly) to give him his second appearance on the list and we'll be seeing him again VERY soon.

I didn't love this, but I definitely preferred it to part I - but unfortunately I don't think there's any point in watching this unless you've previously endured that.  So if you've watched the first one and found it bearable, then I think you should probably give this a go to complete the journey (it's available to stream on MUBI or to rent in all the usual places) - otherwise you're absolutely fine skipping them both.

#30 - A great film with a star performance
#28 - An interesting concept