Alright, I’ll say it. There is one shot that really bothered me. Just one, I promise. When Julie returns to her room after unsuccessfully searching for her dog—which she thought was lost—the camera crash-zooms into the lovely Louis as he lies comfortably next to her mum in bed. I am not sure if it is a pathological condition similar to an allergy or an intolerance like the one I have for butter and coriander. As a matter of fact, I’m very rarely not distracted by zooms. They suddenly make me feel removed if temporarily from the story, unwillingly made aware of the craft.
Apart from that, The Eternal Daughter couldn’t have been worthier of the long wait, confirming Joanna Hogg as one of the finest auteurs of our time, and one of the few for whom I quite literally rush to the cinema as soon as anything new is released.
Constantly swinging between gentle hints of horror and comedy, introspective minimalism and family drama, The Eternal Daughter touches very different human territories, intriguingly exploring the hidden paths that connect them. Being a mother or not having been one, being a daughter, forever, and an artist.
Perhaps the real wonder of the film, Tilda Swinton is simply superb in two very distinct yet tightly related roles. The way the stolid grace of Rosalind’s formal composure counterpoints Julie’s fragility, their different sets of mannerisms, little rituals, miseries, and even language—especially in a film that I assume largely based on improvisation as per Joanna Hogg’s usual process—are perfectly convincing, measured, and beautifully nuanced.
The Eternal Daughter certainly leaves a lot to unravel, but without ever sounding inaccessible or excessively intellectual. Just enough is given out to provoke, keep on the edge, set up a dialogue. A delicate balance that Hogg achieves on the page as well as through her elegant aesthetic instincts.
The slightly washed-out look and the iconic aspect ratio of the Super 16 camera—for my own record, an Arriflex 416 she used for the entire trilogy, to include both chapters of The Souvenir—frame an almost dioramic world in which we are progressively led to suspect that any detail to the tiniest minutiae might have a deeper reason to be. They come in a white cab, Julie leaves alone in a black one. Or the green glow that lights the eerie interiors at night, the hardly discernible noises ominously chiming in and out at all times, the many books, their titles, those about dreamers and those about adventurers. What are artists, methinks, if not both at once. And what is our mind, if not a mazy place with walls and doors, filled with all sorts of sounds.

As I stagger on the bus on my way home dripping tears of an unexpected shower, I realise that part of me missed the presence of a unique character such as that brilliantly played by Tom Burke in The Souvenir—the enigmatic Anthony. In retrospect, he (and his perfect costumes, I should add—the pinstripe suit with pink lining, the military-style long coat, the striped pyjamas) is one of the main reasons I fell so madly in love with it. But the rest of me was also enchanted by the overwhelming if metaphysical persistence of Anthony’s charisma, by the disquietingly accurate portraiture of film students and tutors (man, I found myself thinking, we really are all alike—the same conversations, frustrations, desires, insecurities, and the ‘I always wanted to be like Orson Welles’), and even more by how Joanna Hogg tells of the indissoluble tangle of cinematic and personal urges that life for an artist is—especially in the making, when a voice, this bloody irritating word, is fighting to exist and be heard.

As I return to watching films after one of my recurring hiatuses from the screen, I couldn’t have bumped into something more exciting. And it’s not just because it delves into times and themes that are close to my own experience—Joanna Hogg’s latest truly is a precious gem made of a rare milky matter.
Interesting how The Souvenir, which shines especially for its dialogues, was apparently shot without a traditional screenplay, relying on the improvisational genius of the cast and the sensitivity of the director. It makes me think of an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, when prompted by Dick Cavett took out of his jacket the scripts of his two next films—a bunch of notes on a tiny notebook. And it makes me reflect on the role of the writer, on how actors can de facto become co-authors, and cinema even more creatively collective without watering down the identity of the work.