Know Who You Are at Every Age:
A Sketch on Memory in The Souvenir I & II
I'm not real and I deny, I won't heal unless I cry / I can't grieve, so I won't grow, I won't heal 'til I let it go.
– Cocteau Twins, Know Who You Are at Every Age, from the album Four-Calendar Café, Fontana Records, 1993
● Writing
Though we never hear Cocteau Twins’ Know Who You Are at Every Age in either part of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir—if only because the album it’s from was released in the '90s, later than the film’s setting—its lyrics seem to resonate perfectly with the process of growing up and learning to live with loss that lies at the heart of Hogg’s diptych.
Elizabeth Fraser’s vocal style across Cocteau Twins’ records sounds like a secret language—rooted in English, Scots Gaelic, and French, yet often unintelligible. Recognizable words flicker through like fragments of spells or metaphors, open to being filled with one’s own mental imagery. Hovering between consciousness and the subconscious, certainty and intuition, they resemble scattered emotions that only gain meaning once we gather and interpret them ourselves.
British filmmaker Joanna Hogg is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary cinema, known for her restrained style, autobiographical storytelling, and elliptical approach to narrative form. In The Souvenir (2017) and The Souvenir Part II (2021), she examines the fragments of her own memory, gazing at herself gently, at every age. Joan Didion once wrote that we should always stay in touch with the people we used to be—if we forget them, they return uninvited, banging on our minds at four in the morning. Joanna Hogg has never forgotten. But she waited nearly thirty years to tell her story—to test the reliability of memory. In The Souvenir, she exhumes a devastating, formative relationship with a heroin-addicted man; in the sequel, she performs a painful but necessary exorcism. Both films become acts of reassembling memory and transforming lived experience into art. Cinema, for Hogg, is a medium of recollection and reordering—a space to confront and eventually reconcile with the past.
The titular Souvenir refers to a 1761 painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, a narrative device that initiates the journey. It depicts a young woman—Julie, the heroine of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse—carving her lover’s initials into a tree. As we look at this intimate, miniature scene, we can’t help but wonder how the relationship will unfold. The same thought arises when the characters in The Souvenir contemplate the painting at The Wallace Collection. Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne), a young film student and Hogg’s stand-in, seems as innocent as the girl in the painting when her lover Anthony (Tom Burke) tells her she will always be lost. From that moment on, their doomed romance unspools like a story already foreseen. The image of the souvenir is not only the film’s namesake—it saturates its emotional core, functioning like a Proustian madeleine that lets us read the director’s memories as they resurface through her own gaze.
In interviews, Hogg has admitted she was surprised by how much she remembered during the making of these films. Filmmaking became a form of retrieval, a way to regain agency over her past. Her narrative, woven from autobiographical and meta-textual elements, constructs a constellation of references—she revisits Jessie Matthews’s 1938 song A Souvenir of Love, the films of Powell and Pressburger, the refined interiors of Harrods, 1980s fashion by Manolo Blahnik and Yohji Yamamoto, letters from a former lover, and 16mm film footage she shot herself. This is not a fictional story inspired by memory—it is memory embodied. Every object on screen feels like an extension of Hogg herself. They evoke her spectral presence, which materializes at the end of The Souvenir Part II with a single word spoken by the director: “Cut.” The box of memories is shut.
Production designers Stéphane Collonge and Grace Snell created an exact replica of Hogg’s student flat in Knightsbridge—a fusion of upper-middle-class signifiers and artistic eclecticism, with mirrored walls, a narrow staircase, and a flea-market bed. This meticulous reconstruction contrasts with Hogg’s working method, which avoids conventional scripts. Instead, she writes a story document—a loose collection of structure, character arcs, visual cues, poems, inspirations, and partial dialogues. She blurs fiction and reality, inviting her actors to discover themselves through their roles. For Swinton Byrne, The Souvenir Part II was personally transformative. “Together, the films shine a light on mistakes—and how natural and healthy they are. The more you make, the more you learn.”
Julie’s journey through grief becomes a creative awakening. In the first film, she is a film school freshman, eager to make a thesis about working-class life in Sunderland’s docks—a gesture of class departure.
Her artistic journey is also a class negotiation: a young woman from privilege yearning to step outside it—only to discover that memory, too, is class-coded.
Anthony challenges her with philosophical musings on art: “We don’t want to see life as it is, but as it is experienced through this soft machine,” he says, gesturing toward the camera. His overdose death compels Julie to turn her gaze inward. “I don’t want to show life as it is, but as I imagine it,” she later tells her skeptical professors. “That’s the essence of cinema.” The imagined, in her case, is inseparable from lived experience. By making fiction, she’s never been closer to truth.
The film she creates—presumably titled The Souvenir—becomes both therapy and memorial. Part II builds on the first film’s foundation, opening it up formally and emotionally. Julie’s imagined film is never shown, but Hogg gives us its projection: memories refracted through Julie’s sensibility and wild imagination. It’s as though she follows Anthony’s advice, presenting life through the prism of the “soft machine.” As the protagonist of her imagined film, Julie wanders through shifting aesthetics and cinematic genres, encountering motifs and people from her past, before ultimately returning to reality. If she was lost in Part I, she is, by the end of Part II, at least free—running through a field to the beat of 1980s pop.
Hogg’s memoir movie is as much a coming-of-age story. At the end of the sequel, Julie throws a birthday party in her apartment, just as she did in the first film. As she laughs among friends, the camera pulls back—and we realize we’re watching a scene on a soundstage. Once again, Hogg reveals the frame of the film and the layered construction of memory. Then she says it: “Cut.” Like a spell. The box is closed.