The Souvenir.

Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama The Souvenir made a slew of best-of-2019 lists, taking the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and winning Sight and Sound‘s poll for the best film of 2019. My friend Tim Grierson has been a big advocate of the film, ranking it 7th among films of last year, and of director Joanna Hogg, which was really enough to get me to watch it. It is a very British movie, understated and often ponderous, but it’s bolstered by two very strong performances by the leads and the resolution gives a real catharsis to everything the film has asked you to endure up to that point. (It’s streaming now on Amazon Prime.)

Honor Swinton-Byrne plays Julie, a 24-year-old would-be filmmaker, in film school at the moment, who meets a Foreign Office staffer in his mid-30s named Anthony (Tom Burke) and almost falls into a desultory affair with him, despite his secretive nature and tendency to subtly put her down. It seems like he’s gaslighting her from the start, but it becomes more evident when he starts to borrow money from her – despite him having a job that often sends him abroad, while she’s a poor student – and eventually she learns via a friend of his (Richard Ayaode) that he’s hiding a heroin habit. She’s too enamored of him to leave, however, despite his increasing duplicity, and the relationship begins to consume her as Anthony’s situation gets worse.

This is a very slow burn until the last quarter of the film; there are no screaming fights, no violence, just a few verbal confrontations where Julie ends up apologizing even though Anthony is clearly in the wrong. It’s painful to watch her abase herself for a man who has never shown himself to be worth this kind of devotion; I’m not even clear what his redeeming qualities are supposed to be, as he’s not charming, good-looking, or kind. What finally pushes her to the breaking point is several steps beyond what a rational person would need to say ‘enough,’ but that’s the emotional center of the film – just how far Julie has fallen into this trap, and how easily it happened to her. There have been many entries in the “young woman falls for a feckless, manipulative, older man” genre, but this one, based on Hogg’s own life in film school in the late ’70s, feels extremely realistic because it doesn’t have the Big Moments and never comes across like a film trying to make you feel something specific.

Swinton-Byrne is very convincing as Julie, imbuing the character with naïveté rather than just innocence, and making it a bit more plausible that she’d fall under Anthony’s spell because she seems so lonely in the early scenes – and thus more appreciative of someone, especially an older man, giving her attention. Burke does what he is supposed to be doing with Anthony, although the attraction of such a mopey, vaguely derisive man is beyond me; he does carry himself with an air of sophistication that might explain it, although perhaps it’s just the upper-class English accent that got me. Ayaode is only in one scene, but he grabs the whole thing from the two leads and utterly owns that entire conversation – sitting next to his real-life wife, Lydia Fox, as they talk – while not just delivering a key piece of information to Julie, but doing so with a unique affectation that totally commands your attention. Swinton-Byrne’s mother, Tilda Swinton, appears in the film as Julie’s mother, although her character is something of a cipher and she has little to do until the last few scenes.

The Souvenir is quite good, but also so slow and quiet in parts that it feels almost expressly anti-commercial: The audience for this sort of movie is very small, a set that probably comprises fans of art house films, Anglophiles, and not a whole lot more. I liked it, but I can’t say I enjoyed it, between the pace and the horror of watching Julie so unaware that Anthony is taking advantage of her. It’s a film to be appreciated, rather than one that seeks to entertain.

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I’ve seen 31 movies from 2019 so far, and I have three more I’d really like to see before closing the book on the year, so to speak, all of them foreign-language films. Two are streaming now on Hulu, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Monos, while the third will stream on Amazon Prime in about two weeks, the Oscar-nominated Les Misérables. (Amazon also will premiere the Brazilian submission to the 92nd Oscars, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, this Friday). I’ll probably watch the first in the next few days, and then I’ll rank the movies I’ve seen from 2019, but if you have suggestions I’m all ears.