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The British writer-director Joanna Hogg has the courage of her incoherence.
Her scaffolding is shaky and her vantage often oblique.
She cuts from foggy panoramas to tight close-ups with no evident pattern.
(Maybe shell jump ahead a couple of days.)
Are her actors improvising?
Sometimes they seem to be fumbling along with their characters, headed down irrelevant byways.
But unfocused shes not.
She spoils you for the overshapers, the spoon-feeders.
The movie is never not fascinating.
Youre not meant to laugh at her pretensions, only to register her distance from the world.
One of them seen only from the back at first is particularly foppish.
Perched across from Julie in a tony government building (is she applying for a grant?
and wonders whether shes trying to peddle a received idea of life on the docks.
Very normal, really.
I think Im quite average.
Someday Id like to gather a group of women together and ask if they can see the appeal.
You guess either Anthony degenerates and Julie leaves him or he recovers and she doesnt.
But Julie proves to be not very decisive.
Shes as emotionally incoherent as the movie.
The meta comes in fragments.
(Not in this installment, anyway:The Souvenir: Part IIis in preproduction.)
But I dont want that to seep into the film.
Somehow its like putting a veil on it.
I cheer Hoggs aversion to sentimentality, but that answer needs unpacking.
If she didnt want to connect with the emotions she felt at the time, its a big problem.
It feels detached, but when you get it, youre overwhelmed by it.
That by itself is unspeakably moving.
