Even viewers who've seen filmmaker Joanna Hogg's semi-autobiographical dramas The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II may not immediately realize that Hogg's The Eternal Daughter is essentially The Souvenir Part III. Honor Swinton Byrne, who played Hogg's counterpart Julie Hart in the first two movies, is gone, replaced by Byrne's own real-life mother, Tilda Swinton. Swinton played Julie's mother, Rosalind, in the previous two installments, and here she plays both Rosalind and Julie, in a story that takes place decades after the 1980s-set Souvenir movies.
That sounds confusing, but it's not really necessary to be familiar with the previous movies to appreciate The Eternal Daughter, which functions as a sort of standalone coda to Julie's artistic coming-of-age. Middle-aged Julie is firmly established as a filmmaker, and she's working on her latest project as she and Rosalind arrive at a secluded hotel in Wales, where they appear to be the only guests. Before it was a hotel, the estate was a private home owned by Rosalind's aunt, where she stayed as a child during World War II. Julie has brought Rosalind there to celebrate her birthday, but she also has an ulterior motive, surreptitiously recording Rosalind's childhood stories as material for the movie she's writing.
Like The Souvenir Part II, which followed Julie as she made a movie about the events of the first Souvenir, The Eternal Daughter is cleverly self-reflexive, both for Julie and for Hogg. Hogg interrogates her relationship to her own mother via a movie about a filmmaker interrogating her relationship to her mother, and she envelops it in the trappings of a Gothic ghost story, as if Julie and Rosalind are staying at Wuthering Heights or Alfred Hitchcock's Manderley. The hotel grounds are shrouded in fog, and Julie wanders the empty corridors at night, hearing strange noises. Doors open by themselves, and a friendly caretaker (Joseph Mydell) pops up seemingly out of nowhere just when he's needed most.
That's better than the sullen, unhelpful receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies) who doubles as the equally surly waitress in the hotel's deserted restaurant. Davies brings some welcome sardonic humor to a movie that is mostly a somber examination of generational guilt, as Julie struggles with her obligations to her aging mother. She makes late-night phone calls to an offscreen husband and has trouble concentrating on her work, as she focuses all of her energy on pleasing the prim, reserved Rosalind.
Rosalind was previously more of a background character, but here the mother-daughter relationship is the center of the story, and Swinton effortlessly plays opposite herself. Although the two characters are rarely in the same frame, Swinton makes their interplay feel natural. She delivers two distinctive performances, connecting back to Byrne's previous work as Julie, while also emphasizing the similarities between mother and daughter.
The ghosts in The Eternal Daughter are not just metaphorical, and Hogg builds to a twist that is both obvious and a bit disappointing, a perfunctory nod to the Gothic tradition that doesn't entirely fit with the family narrative. It does, however, fit with the journey for Julie that Hogg has created across three movies now, placing the filmmaker character within various cinematic milieus. Just as The Souvenir Part II blurred the lines between Julie's movie and Julie's life, The Eternal Daughter blurs the lines between Julie's reality and her imagination of it.
It's no surprise that by the end, Julie is writing the screenplay for The Eternal Daughter, setting down the opening scene just as it was presented 90 minutes earlier. For Hogg, life can only be lived as a movie, and The Eternal Daughter remains dedicated to that alternately frustrating and rewarding worldview. ♦
The Eternal Daughter
