Venice at Home – Day 7: Between Reverie and Realism

by Cláudio Alves

In 1986, Joanna Hogg presented her thesis film at the National Film and Television School. Unlike the Sunderland photographs and experimental super-8 footage that had won her a place to study, Caprice feels like a repudiation of reality altogether. The short considers the Alice in Wonderland-esque journey of a mousy young woman through the pages of her favorite fashion magazine, all rendered in stylized staging and haute-couture. That work marked another's cinematic debut besides Hogg – Caprice was Tilda Swinton's first appearance on film. The schoolmates turned longtime friends turned artistic collaborators present their latest project at this year's Venice Film Festival – The Eternal Daughter, where the actress plays a double role.

Our Venice at Home program takes us back to one of the Italian director's first international hits and the second chapter in Hogg's multi-film memory play...

THE SOUVENIR: PART II (2021)
Some critics have described The Eternal Daughter as a continuation of Hogg's autobiographical reveries in The Souvenir films. Once again, Swinton portrays Rosalind, a filmmaker's mother, but this time she's also the cineaste herself, Julie aged up from when Honor Swinton-Byrne played her. The last time I covered Hogg in one of these "at Home" projects, I expressed my love for The Souvenir, so it seems only logical to now consider its direct sequel, stuck in the middle between the original and this new, unofficial The Souvenir: Part III.

Like its eldest sibling, Hogg's 2021 film moves on its own fluid path, rejecting tidy narrative structure for something more abstract. Like a flurry of recollections imprinted on celluloid flypaper, The Souvenir: Part II floats by in fits and starts, rigorously put together but airy enough to feel like a half-remembered dream. After the death of her boyfriend in the precious film, film student Julie tries to fuel her trauma into a memoirist project in time for graduation. Still, the path towards the premiere cum graduation isn't without its challenges. Creating art as an act of self-exposure is never an easy task.

One commends Hogg for how mercilessly she showcases her younger self's faults, incompetence, and anxieties enshrined within the comfort of socioeconomic privilege. The limits of insularity grow tighter, tenser, as the narrative unfolds, and something as simple as the smashing of a ceramic mug can feel like a stab to the heart. The inconsequential reverberates against all reason, an earthquake felt only by Julie, Hogg, her camera, and us, the audience. For many, it'll be frustrating, if not insufferable. Even so, the relationship between the two Souvenirs illuminates rare considerations about the creative act, cinema as a reflective surface and a confessional, perhaps a magnifying glass.

Navel-gazing is taken to its limits until it explodes. The balloon swells throughout, often prodded by unexpected comedic beats courtesy of a sharp-tongued Richard Ayoade – his character's name is Patrick, but he's Julien Temple. And yet, it's not his deft admonishment against obviousness that does the trick, nor the soundtrack's ironic inquiry if "is that all there is." Instead, epiphany comes through abandoning a pursuit of the real, as Caprice reappears in a mutated state, crossbred with the first Souvenir. Like a Powell & Pressburger nightmare, Julie's graduation short is a self-indictment and examination, a reflection twisted by carnival mirrors and smothered in high fashion. 

It's a revelation, that's what it is, concluding The Souvenir: Part II's psychological dissections with a gift of transcendence. Dreams of light projected into a dark room are a doorway to another world. Sometimes it's an editorial wonderland. Sometimes, it's a meta-cinematic introspection that argues for repetition as an epic gesture. It further defends artifice as the lens through which truth can be best expressed, a spell of fakery that's more real than reality, or indeed realism.

The Souvenir: Part II is streaming on Fubo, Showtime, and DirecTV. You can also rent it on most of the major platforms.

On this seventh day of festivities, Gianni Amelio also returns to the official competition, having won the Golden Lion in 1998 with The Way he Laughed. Let's wait and see if his new film, The Lord of the Ants, is as fortunate. In the meantime, our Venice at Home program takes us back to one of the Italian director's first international hits.

THE STOLEN CHILDREN (1992) 
Italian Neorealism has a long tradition of melodramas in poverty-stricken milieus, often revolving around the oft-disenfranchised, like children. Such is the case of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, one of the seminal neorealist films and a significant influence on Italian cinema forevermore. Gianni Amelio's early features exemplify a continuation of these traditions, trends, and movements. Look no further than The Stolen Children, one of the director's most acclaimed works – it won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the European Film Award for Best Picture. It later became Italy's Oscar submission for the 65th Academy Awards. 

Despite its international acclaim and globetrotting prize-winning, The Stolen Children is a surprisingly modest little film. Dealing with a premise prone to devolution into misery porn, Amelio avoids such a pitfall. He does it by valuing contention over cheap sentiment, silence over lachrymose scoring. The story of a cop saddled with the care of two children recently taken from their parents unfurls at a leisurely pace, making a virtue out of inaction. Rather than propelling the characters across plot contrivances, Amelio lets the situation unfurl organically, exploring abusive dynamics through their behavioral consequences, dramatizing unthinkable pain while circumventing exploitation.

Grace is prerogative to The Stolen Children, even as its narrative reveals matters of child prostitution and insubordination against unjust laws. This last point is maybe the feature's least successful facet – apart from its pro-cop stance – seeing as it gets spelled out rather plainly over a party conversation attended by the kind of characters that speak in clumsy summations of overarching themes. Thankfully, even then, Amelio's deft hand with actors helps navigate The Stolen Children out of mediocrity. Enrico Lo Verso is a solid presence as the carabinieri protagonist. That being said, the child actors are the true stars – Valentina Scalici and Giuseppe Ieracitano, two naturalistic marvels that don't seem to work on film anymore.

You can rent The Stolen Children on Amazon Video, Google Play, and Youtube.

Do you think Joanna Hogg or Gianni Amelio have a chance at winning Venice gold?

Comments

[thevoid99]

I've never seen anything by Joanna Hogg though I do have The Souvenir and its sequel in my DVR (still trying to find the time to watch them).