Archipelago (2010).
On a pleasant afternoon in the Isles of Scilly, a family stand to have a photograph taken. Of the two grown-up children, their mother, and her friend, only the blond, curly-haired son has his face fully in the sunshine; he squints in the light. Edward, one of the central characters in Joanna Hogg’s second feature Archipelago (2010), is different from his mother Patricia and her sister Cynthia. He has “too much empathy,” according to his mother, and “always in an accusatory way,” his sister adds with a sneer. Virtuous Edward is about to go on a gap year to Africa, in that vague way that a gap year so often seems to be blithely to the continent rather than a particular place within it. Until then, he is spending some time with his family in an agreeably beige and blue country retreat, which is complete with a professional cook, Rose, who boils fresh lobsters and plucks fresh game for them. Cynthia supposes it is “quite a nice job actually,” shrugging as she has another sip of red wine. Edward on the other hand is aghast at the suggestion, and throughout the film makes a display of extreme discomfort at the fact of belonging to such a wealthy family, one able to afford serviced private accommodation for a few weeks a year. Why shouldn’t he be happy with a bowl of cereal for breakfast, and pour the milk himself? Why shouldn’t he help Rose after dinner—pull on a pair of rubber gloves and give her hand with the washing-up?
Such class tensions often wrinkle the expensive fabric of Hogg’s films, which have tended to be received, and sometimes dismissed, as stories simply about the rich. In Artforum, Amy Taubin writes that these films are “blind, willfully or naively, to everything outside the English upper-middle class.”1 This is a cinema of old money, with characters who holiday in Tuscany, live in affluent Knightsbridge, and speak with begrudging affection about fathers who shoot pheasant for sport. Hogg herself is also not like most of us. Descended from statesmen, her honorable late mother had a peerage and gave her the painfully posh middle name Wynfreda (which is the “W” in JWH Films, Hogg’s production house). Given the current miserable economic climate, as well as the extent to which spectators are now marketed content on some dubious basis of it skewering the rich, it is hard to be surprised when I hear friends say that they don’t like Hogg’s films. As much as I sympathize with an allergy to the rich, however, an attendant aversion to Hogg’s films doesn’t amount to class critique or solidarity with the struggling classes—mentioned in passing, it is as ineffective as a bit of performative washing-up. By the same token, watching and appreciating these films is hardly a case of class treachery, a crossing of enemy lines. In Archipelago, a detached mode of filmmaking allows us to observe from a distance, but in detail, the blindness on which Taubin hits: one form of it, willful, and the other, naïve.
The Souvenir (2019).
There are certainly characters in Hogg’s films who willfully blind themselves to anything beyond the English upper-middle class: Cynthia, for instance, who would prefer not to talk to the help unless absolutely necessary. To her cynical mind, Edward’s noble fussing is very embarrassing; she stifles a laugh as Rose is made ever more redundant. There are then other characters who are naively blind. In an amorphous, misguided manner, they are concerned about cultivating an awareness of the wider world—everything outside, from the cook in the kitchen to all of Africa. Edward is one such oblivious character, and young Julie in The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021) is another. At the beginning of the first film, Julie has an ill-conceived idea about making a feature film of adversity faced in a Sunderland shipyard. Both socially and geographically, it is a situation many miles away from her own (as a student, she cooks fillet steak purchased from the deluxe food halls of Harrods for dinner). In one scene, Anthony, her mysterious, raffish romantic interest, turns to her with exasperation, urging her not to be so anxiously “worthy” in her art but instead to be “arrogant—much more sexy.” And it’s a good word, this “arrogant.” Sharing a root with the verb “arrogate” in the Latin arrogare, “to claim for oneself,” it’s an apt adjective for the upper-middle class characters of Hogg’s films. In more or less feeble efforts to counteract financial worth with moral worth, Edward and Julie try to replace arrogance—that is, willful blindness—with some sort of apology: a little, individual apology that no one asked them for.
However blind Cynthia, Edward, and young Julie may be to the rest of the world, and in whichever way, Hogg’s films themselves are not deaf to what lies outside their moneyed interiors. On more than one occasion, the uninvited underclasses edge into the frame, knock at the door, threaten to let themselves in. All of this trespassing and arriving unannounced is accompanied by what sound scholar Hannah Paveck calls “ambient intrusions” in an essay on Hogg’s Exhibition (2013). She notes “abrupt shifts between noise and quietude” as the “hum of traffic and the drill of construction” seep through the walls of the modernist house at the center of that film, unsettling the still focus of the reclusive artist within.2 Hogg goes on to craft a muted horror of such ambient intrusions in The Eternal Daughter (2022). In a symphony of haunting, floorboards creak, aging bulbs buzz, and a window bangs in the wind. What could be disturbing Hogg’s characters now?
The Eternal Daughter (2022).
The Eternal Daughter reprises Julie and her mother Rosalind from The Souvenir films, in which Honor Swinton Byrne played Julie and her mother Tilda Swinton played Rosalind. Now the elder Swinton stars as both characters—a contrivance that causes more shot-reverse-shots for Hogg than ever before. If the ethereal presence of one Tilda tends to be enough to suggest a suspension of the real world, then Tilda deux fois indicates a milieu completely adrift from normality. In casting an aristocrat with an alien star image not once but twice here, Hogg underlines Julie’s unworldliness rather than having her avatar character dwell on how to fix it.
Some thirty narrative years after The Souvenir films, Julie and Rosalind take a trip to an imposing hotel near Moel Famau, a hill in Wales not too far from Liverpool across the English-Welsh border. Every corner of the old manor is furnished in costly dark wood and upholstered in a tasteful Regency green. Every plate on offer at dinner is heritage and the feta in the beetroot salad is, felicitously, local. Rosalind used to come here, she says, when her family used to own the old manor. In the fantasy of the film, the splendid place is back to how it was in that period: no one seems to be staying in the grand hotel apart from Julie and Rosalind. Rosalind likes it this way: it is “so cozy,” if “very selfish, just the two of them.” Lofty isolation is not a novelty when it comes to Hogg’s films, but it is heightened to comic effect here. Even in an open hotel with numerous rooms, the rich separate themselves from the rabble. Continuing to depart from the naturalistic aesthetic of her earlier films, Hogg renders this improbable situation a projection: we are now in the realm of Julie’s psychodrama rather than in any reality.
This does not mean the thorny question of class disappears. Although she no longer resolves upper-middle class guilt with vainglorious notions of going on a mission “up north” where, as the dismissive phrase goes, “it’s grim,” Julie is reminded, once in a while, of the existence of others. In the Moel Famau hotel, the stage for Julie’s fretful thoughts, the two staff members are less like actual people than two sides of how she perceives, and is perceived by, these others. The benign Black night watchman who serves as a guardian angel to her and Rosalind is a sign that Julie is still as blissfully ignorant on some matters as her elderly mother. The terse receptionist who always levels an arched eyebrow at her faintly ridiculous behavior, however, is a sign that Julie is more awake to the world.
Julie’s worries circle around what right she has to take stories from her mother in order to make art. Claiming things for herself is now less a matter of class relations and refers instead to the conundrum of autofiction, as tireless efforts to please her mother and to write her script go hand-in-hand. Something other than the anguish over arrogance, arrogation, and autofiction haunts Hogg’s films as well; it is there in her latest title. Hogg’s women are childless—never mothers, eternal daughters—and they are invariably troubled by it. In Unrelated (2007), the post-menopausal protagonist sobs that she “will be forever now on the periphery” without children. In Exhibition, a woman artist content to inhabit that outer edge nonetheless finds a societal child-centrism encroaching on it; to get out of talk about other people’s progeny at a dinner party, she feigns fainting. Overhearing Rosalind speaking to the caretaker one evening in The Eternal Daughter, Julie catches her discussing her filmmaking and writing as an obstacle to having children—if not an obstacle, then a substitute for them. Alongside banging, buzzing, and creaking, these maternal whispers form another ambient intrusion in the film.
The Eternal Daughter (2022).
Instructive books for an agitated creative mind lie on the table between the twin beds of the hotel room where Julie cannot sleep and Rosalind takes pills to do so: one is a Dictionary of Dreaming and another is Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint. Elizabeth Bishop is not among the spines that I can see; even so, three lines from her poem “One Art” come to mind toward the end of the film.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
The art of losing is, in fact, hard to master in Hogg’s films. While we don’t know, can merely surmise, the politics of Hogg’s characters, they certainly spend a lot of time being small-c conservative in their attachments to kin, places, and things. In The Eternal Daughter, Tilda-Julie and Tilda-Rosalind appear at a birthday dinner in the same dresses—red and green with geometric patterns—that Honor-Julie and Tilda-Rosalind wore for another birthday dinner in The Souvenir, decades before. Yet Hogg’s films are increasingly affairs of letting go: the modernist house in Exhibition is sold, the romantic illusions of The Souvenir pass away.
Holding on even grows irritating in The Eternal Daughter. Once the proud property of Julie and Rosalind’s ancestors, the old manor is now a source of ambient annoyance, as is Rosalind’s plastic carrier bag of unknown keepsakes, a synthetic eyesore and earsore that scrunches as she brings it from room to room. After wakeful nights of melancholic bother, Julie mourns Rosalind; maybe she mourns the cloistered, fusty old world to which she was tied, too. She comes downstairs one morning to find that the hotel is filled with guests where ghosts once were—and she sees them where she was blind, just hearing things before. Does she need to inherit stories from her mother, or continue the same line of stories with children of her own, when there are other stories right there, right under her nose?
1. Amy Taubin, “Peaks and Valleys: A Second Look at the 60th New York Film Festival,” Artforum, October 21 2022: https://artforum.com/film/a-second-look-at-the-60th-new-york-film-festival-89469.
2. Hannah Paveck, “Ambient Intrusions: Listening to Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition,” Film + Place + Architecture 1 (June 2017): 16-19.