boresville

Natasha and I went to see The Souvenir yesterday. I hate to only blog about creative disappointments, but they're kind of the most notable thing that happens to me week to week.

The movie was so intensely mediocre. To begin with, it's a little bit schticky: the director recreates the interiors and true events of her early 20s, focusing on a relationship with an older man who turns out to be a heroin addict. The schtick is its supposed fidelity to real life, I guess. I think the film wants to play with this and pose questions about fidelity and remembering–that very basic thing people always say about how a memory constantly retraced ends up further and further from its actuality. I'm not that interested in this and I'm not totally certain if Joanna Hogg is super interested in this but it felt sort of like the fall-back "theoretical" interest of the film. This, alongside with a vaguely formulated question about film "representing" vs. "expressing" something about reality. I think this question is valid and could be compelling, but maybe I'm a snob in that I think you need to enter at a higher level than Hogg appears to enter at.

As Natasha and I discussed afterward, it was incredibly heavy-handed. Lots of mirrors reflecting the characters, there was a lot of "leading the horse to water" kind of writing. In one scene, the main character and her film school classmates talk about Hitchcock and the shower scene in psycho and I think they're trying to meditate on the operations of montage and the "unseen," but it just made me feel like Hogg had recently read Zizek's Lacan and Hitchcock book or she hasn't but really should because it'll save her a lot of time.

Anyway, the movie was a disappointment, and I think it comes down to it not really navigating its own interests well enough. Is this a theoretical self-reflexive arthouse film about how to use one's own life as material? Or is this the result of the director trying to figure this problem itself out–how to use her own life as material–and tell us her story effectively. It doesn't have to pick just one but it needed to tackle each with much greater care and maturity.

The other thing this movie brought up, also discussed afterward, was just this very basic and annoying problem of no one ever wanting to tell a story anymore. Like tell a story about something that doesn't already exist. The basic problem of imagination. All of these people–filmmakers, artists, etc.– have so narrowed their scope to their own experience that its sucked all of the fun out of the art itself. After a certain point self-reflection ceases to be of use. Hogg circles this momentarily in the movie when the boyfriend character gets annoyed with the main girl for saying he's "not himself." He tells her that no one is 'themself' and she of all people should know that you can be different at different times during the day, on different days, etc. This is not what the movie was about but it was far more interesting than the actual narrative, in my opinion. I'm much more interested in the problem of–if you HAVE to make something autobiographical–the necessary conversion of oneself into a coherent character.

I want people to make movies because they're interested in movies and what it means to make them, not because they think they have a "powerful story" or whatever.

I also just really don't like heroin movies. Panic in Needle Park, Requiem for a Dream, Trainspotting. No thank you.