Photo: HBO
I recently watched The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg’s partly autobiographical film about a young filmmaker who gets wrapped up in a toxic and emotionally abusive relationship with an older man. While looking up where to stream it, Google presented me with its “top voted tags” for the movie (I have no idea how these are generated), which were: slow, boring, pretentious, overrated, confusing, strong acting, and “+3 more.” Perfect, I thought.
One fascinating technique the film repeatedly uses is to obfuscate the beginnings of things and drop us into events well past when they’ve begun. The entire beginning of the central romantic relationship is left offscreen, as is all but the ending of a very significant argument between the couple. It’s…