Joan­na Hogg’s mem­oir goes meta in the first trail­er for The Sou­venir Part II

Joan­na Hogg​’s drama­tised auto­bi­og­ra­phy The Sou­venir recount­ed her for­ma­tive love for the charm­ing yet cad­dish Antho­ny (Tom Burke) via the on-screen avatar Julie (Hon­or Swin­ton-Byrne). Where’s a film­mak­er to go from there? Her answer is both sim­ple and com­plex: the life that came afterward.

In her new sequel The Sou­venir Part II, the trail­er for which arrived online just this morn­ing, Hogg slips into the realm of the meta as film stu­dent Julie goes about direct­ing a fea­ture based on her dal­liance with Antho­ny, in essence reliv­ing pro­duc­tion of the first Sou­venir pic­ture. While the film some­times teas­es its self-reflex­ive struc­ture, the true sto­ry at hand is that of a young woman com­ing into her own and find­ing her con­fi­dence in her own artis­tic skills.

Julie begins shoot­ing her own in-uni­verse work of mem­oir, but faces obsta­cles in a hot-tem­pered cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, demand­ing actors (Joe Alwyn and Har­ris Dick­in­son), and her own unsure­ness. (She doesn’t know whether the cam­era belongs here, there, or over there.) Com­pound­ing her stress is the return of fan favorite Patrick (Richard Ayoade), a fel­low cineaste who runs his set with a far tighter fist when he’s not drop­ping gold-plat­ed one-liners.

In her first-look review from Cannes, our own Han­nah Strong was effu­sive, declar­ing Hogg’s lat­est as ​“an immac­u­late study of grief and film­mak­ing. It’s a beguil­ing work from a mas­ter of her craft that holds the art of film­mak­ing in its pierc­ing gaze, and speaks to an uncom­pro­mis­ing vision of what cin­e­ma can be with a lit­tle faith and imagination.”

This nat­u­ral­ly rais­es the ques­tion of what shape a hypo­thet­i­cal Sou­venir III might take. One can only hope that she goes the Char­lie Kauf­man route and con­tin­ues in con­cen­tric diegetic cir­cles – the next film will be about Julie mak­ing a film about her efforts to make that pre­vi­ous film, with Hogg direct­ing Swin­ton-Byrne direct­ing her actress direct­ing yet anoth­er actress, and so on and so forth.

The Sou­venir Part II comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 29 Octo­ber, and the UK on 21 Jan­u­ary, 2022.