Is Hogg here a minimalist struggling to reconcile an attraction to maximalism, a realist who can't let go of the oneiric, or maybe just a brilliant creator of vignettes desperately trying to figure out how to tell a long-form story?
Mostly I think it's the last of these. She's never done better than in Archipelago, where the vignettes had free reign to comically and sadly portray the maddening trivia of an upper-class family life, offset against the son's largely hopeless pursuit of meaning and purpose in developing-world philanthropy. The intelligence of the film was in realising just how rich all this barely perceptible stuff could be.
Cut a few years later to The Souvenir Part I and we find Hogg taking on a highly perceptible Big Subject, the death of her heroin addict boyfriend, in what proved, not necessarily paradoxically, to be an altogether duller and more conventional film. I don't mean to be unfeeling about what must have been a traumatic event, but the film is a case study in how the transfer of such real-life devastation into compelling story material is no simple thing - and by no means a guarantor of artistic quality on its own.
Part II, with its Cocteau-like, high-artifice student film within the film and flipping of film sets with real settings attempts, sort of, to tackle or at least acknowledge the trickiness of the endeavour. Actually, for me the thing is at its strongest on Hogg's home turf of sometimes sad, sometimes subtly comic realist set-pieces: the protagonist's visit to her dead boyfriend's parents and a particularly good little sequence on her mother learning ceramics. All this is early in the film and it's all I personally could ask for: shots as spare and beautifully composed as Vermeer or Piero, perfectly observed human interaction and deep feeling breaking through the quotidian and the politesse. This is where not just Hogg, but her actors get to shine, particularly Tilda Swinton, doing some of her very best work. Elsewhere, Richard Ayoade, likewise stands out, a bad director, ironically, in real life here portraying an aggressively intelligent and confident one in what's probably also his strongest acting anywhere. Accolades are due to both performers, but it's also a testament to Hogg's craft as both writer and director that she can get such gold from them and others here.
This kind of work is delicate and requires patience and when Hogg elsewhere tries to cut loose with dream imagery and film sets merging with reality, it looks like a loss of patience, understandable but a wrongturning. I may be missing something, but it just doesn't seem to me she has much to say at these points, despite the appearance of major statements being made.
Towards the end, her young director self gives an interview in which she candidly admits, in fact, that she still hasn't much to say. I think the point is supposed to be that she's in denial about the horror she's been through with her boyfriend - and the fact that it might constitute strong story material. But maybe what Hogg's really inadvertently acknowledging is that she has no conversion technique, no way of taking this compelling raw material and creating a metaphor or otherwise giving it a shape that can communicate it to an audience. That, ultimately, is what I think we've been watching: her struggling to find that way of connecting, from life to art and back again, and ultimately, I regret to say, failing.
Mostly I think it's the last of these. She's never done better than in Archipelago, where the vignettes had free reign to comically and sadly portray the maddening trivia of an upper-class family life, offset against the son's largely hopeless pursuit of meaning and purpose in developing-world philanthropy. The intelligence of the film was in realising just how rich all this barely perceptible stuff could be.
Cut a few years later to The Souvenir Part I and we find Hogg taking on a highly perceptible Big Subject, the death of her heroin addict boyfriend, in what proved, not necessarily paradoxically, to be an altogether duller and more conventional film. I don't mean to be unfeeling about what must have been a traumatic event, but the film is a case study in how the transfer of such real-life devastation into compelling story material is no simple thing - and by no means a guarantor of artistic quality on its own.
Part II, with its Cocteau-like, high-artifice student film within the film and flipping of film sets with real settings attempts, sort of, to tackle or at least acknowledge the trickiness of the endeavour. Actually, for me the thing is at its strongest on Hogg's home turf of sometimes sad, sometimes subtly comic realist set-pieces: the protagonist's visit to her dead boyfriend's parents and a particularly good little sequence on her mother learning ceramics. All this is early in the film and it's all I personally could ask for: shots as spare and beautifully composed as Vermeer or Piero, perfectly observed human interaction and deep feeling breaking through the quotidian and the politesse. This is where not just Hogg, but her actors get to shine, particularly Tilda Swinton, doing some of her very best work. Elsewhere, Richard Ayoade, likewise stands out, a bad director, ironically, in real life here portraying an aggressively intelligent and confident one in what's probably also his strongest acting anywhere. Accolades are due to both performers, but it's also a testament to Hogg's craft as both writer and director that she can get such gold from them and others here.
This kind of work is delicate and requires patience and when Hogg elsewhere tries to cut loose with dream imagery and film sets merging with reality, it looks like a loss of patience, understandable but a wrongturning. I may be missing something, but it just doesn't seem to me she has much to say at these points, despite the appearance of major statements being made.
Towards the end, her young director self gives an interview in which she candidly admits, in fact, that she still hasn't much to say. I think the point is supposed to be that she's in denial about the horror she's been through with her boyfriend - and the fact that it might constitute strong story material. But maybe what Hogg's really inadvertently acknowledging is that she has no conversion technique, no way of taking this compelling raw material and creating a metaphor or otherwise giving it a shape that can communicate it to an audience. That, ultimately, is what I think we've been watching: her struggling to find that way of connecting, from life to art and back again, and ultimately, I regret to say, failing.