The keepsake part II Captures the Ragged beauty of the 1980s Like No other film

every event is one aspect and a thousand things—one aspect as you're residing it, and a thousand issues as, in the years in a while, you remember it. If Joanna Hogg's 2019 film The souvenir is the factor, The souvenir half II speaks of the thousand things that come after, the kaleidoscope mosaic of damaged bits we name reminiscence. within the souvenir, naïve aspiring filmmaker Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), dwelling in London but hailing from a genteel family unit within the countryside, falls in love with Anthony (Tom Burke), an older, rakish charmer who claims to work for the overseas office, and he probably may. but his precise job is being a secret junkie, deceiving Julie and even stealing from her, only to leave her bereft when he dies from an overdose. The memento half II shows us what Julie does, and who she becomes, after that loss—it's about the thousand issues for you to shape her, and retain sha ping her, even beyond the film's ultimate body. reminiscence isn't a element we grasp onto; it's the thing we develop into.

The keepsake half II is each a sequel and a beginning. both films are set in the 1980s and are, as Hogg has observed in interviews, semi-autobiographical, impressed by way of a relationship she had as a younger woman. however the memento half II, each extra established and more intimate, unlocks the earlier image. even though fantastically made and acted, The keepsake had the sad, chilly pallor of a centuries-historical miniature portrait, a bit of of the previous you might cling for your hand and yet on no account utterly grasp. The souvenir part II puts the previous film in a much bigger, extra particular frame, dashing in with swirls of context, color and viewpoint. It's also a movie about youthful eagerness, in regards to the desire to be a person, to make whatever, to position a mark on the realm that claims, i am right here. And that, it looks, isn't whatever that changes with the shift of generations.

We get a sense of Julie's ambitions early on in the movie, even though they're so entwined with her grief that both fuse, like the twin heads of Janus. immediately following Anthony's death, she has retreated to her parents' domestic, a tasteful mini-manor of mossy patterned wallpaper, cushiony sheet-draped couches, and tail-wagging spaniels. Her mom (as soon as once again played, splendidly, by using Tilda Swinton, Byrne's mom in actual existence) tries to appease her via her mourning, a fluttering, shielding warmth lurking beneath her aristocratic coolness. Her father (James Spencer Ashworth, additionally splendid) is a practical and a bit of distracted nation dad who's attempting, now not always effectively, to consider what his daughter is up to. These two are attempting to preserve Julie within the parental cocoon, but she truly wants to get lower back to faculty, back to the system of st arting her lifestyles. In London, she visits the set of a director buddy, Patrick (a marvelously flamboyant Richard Ayoade, additionally getting back from the first film), who's so preoccupied with his personal flailing undertaking that he waves her grief away. He was Anthony's chum, too, and he has no answers for Julie, however he does toss her a immediate: "Make a memorial for him."

© Sandro Kopp/A24 Honor Swinton Byrne and Tilda Swinton in 'The memento half II' Sandro Kopp/A24

The rest of The souvenir half II shows how Julie's tentative, unformed concepts develop into her graduate film, a movie version of the story instructed in the keepsake, this time peopled not with herself and her lifeless loved, but with actors—she's hoping, it looks, not to capture the fact but to ultimately see it, like a revelation forged upon the wall with the aid of shadow puppets. As she directs her performers, she revisits her relationship with Anthony and strives to make feel of it, at one point stammering to clarify the inexplicable to the guy student, Garance (Ariane Labed), she has solid as some version of herself. Garance has some questions about motivation: why is her persona behaving this manner, and not that method? Julie tries to clarify, faltering, until the answer comes superb out in a whisper: "as a result of that's no longer how it happened."

We in no way see the film-within-a-movie that Julie makes, notwithstanding we get whatever thing possibly improved, a reel of reminiscences rendered in dream imagery a la Jean Cocteau. Yet the precise film, the unseen one, is what permits Julie to re-enter the realm after her grief, better than before: She learns to talk authoritatively to her crew, even when the director of photography pushes lower back at what he sees as her disorganization. She flirts, tentatively, with her sweet, supportive editor (Joe Alwyn), asking him again to her flat; he rejects her, gently, via telling her he need to get home to make supper for his boyfriend. ("He hasn't been very neatly for a long time now," he says, a murmur of a proof that displays the mood of the early days of the AIDS disaster, a terrifying reality that hit everyone within the arts, without delay or in any other case.) prior, she'd indulged in a one-nighttim e stand with a scampish actor (Charlie Heaton)—the assignation activities probably the most most desirable post-intercourse sight gags ever put to movie.

The souvenir half II is a greater buoyant, funnier movie than its predecessor. Hogg had at the beginning meant to make both videos on the identical time, and even though that plan didn't determine, it hardly concerns. If The keepsake is a puff, The keepsake part II is a sigh—they're each part of the same breath. As Julie, Byrne appears to flow from that film to this: she's an impressive, affectless performer, her face instinctively turning to the mild like a sunflower. There's a second within the keepsake half II that refracts a flash of the severe ache Julie felt throughout her affair with Anthony—right here, Byrne's face, uncooked with confusion, is almost insufferable to examine. however via the film's closing moments, a coda showing what's presumably Julie's thirtieth party, all of that struggling has been absorbed and subsumed into radiance. Julie's informal openness to the world is appropriate there to look, on Byrne's face.

© Josh Barrett/A24 Honor Swinton Byrne in 'The souvenir part II' Josh Barrett/A24

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Hogg and Byrne have given us a benevolent film about the self-absorption of the younger; possibly jolting ourselves out of self-absorption is a technique we stumble towards generosity. what will The keepsake half II look like to americans who are now of their twenties, roughly the age Julie is within the movie—as hostile to these, like me, who are Hogg's contemporaries? I get the sense that many younger people just consider of the Eighties as an period of bad perms, large shoulder pads and John Hughes movies. but Hogg—together with her costume clothier, Grace Snell—captures whatever thing concerning the period I haven't seen in any other film, the ragged great thing about just getting with the aid of while trying to make whatever turn up, in a world where the web had now not yet intruded with its pretense of connecting us. She gets the look and consider of young people of the time, americans striving to do new issues, but also just identifying how to live. Julie comes from funds, so her clothes are greater stylish than the stuff most of us made do with, but they vibrate with the same spirit: guys's jackets from the thrift-shop racks, sleeves rolled up to reveal the liner; pointed leather-based residences that you just wore to death; huge shirts below excessive-button vests. You had to be as cool as you may well be on what you could come up with the money for, which always wasn't lots.

i thought about this as I left the film and walked to the subway, still lost within the movie's spell but absolutely composed—except I wasn't. I burst into tears over the style issues had been within the '80s and are not any longer, however also for the manner Hogg had captured the rocky exuberance of simply being that age, and the intensity of the issues we wanted. What had it been like, to believe such anticipation blended with uncertainty, all jumbled up with being completely depressing? The memento half II brought it all again. A thousand issues. One film.