Caprice

 

self-portrait of Joanna Hogg, 1980

Hogg on the set with Tilda Swinton

CAPRICE                   B+                                                                                                        Great Britain  (28 mi)  1986  d: Joanna Hogg

Expressing a fun and playful side not seen in her other films, this is Joanna Hogg’s graduation short at the National Film and Television School starring a then unknown Tilda Swinton, listed in the credits as “Matilda” Swinton, a reminder of just how early in her career this is, having met when they were just ten years old, placed in the same dormitory as boarding school students at the West Heath Girls’ School in southeast London in 1971.  One thing that’s already apparent at this early stage is just how extraordinary Tilda Swinton is as an actress, exhibiting a wide range of emotions and facial expressions, where she’s just so transparently revealing.  Known for playing eccentric and enigmatic characters, working with directors like Derek Jarman, Wes Anderson, and Luca Guadagnino, with no formal training, yet she’s capable of shifting between sexes and centuries, sprinkling in mainstream films with indie roles, Swinton won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Tony Gilroy’s MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007), having begun her career working for Derek Jarman in the experimental and challenging film CARVAGGIO (1986), which was made immediately following this film.  She ended up making nine films with Jarman, part of a collective queer movement in London, a time when British culture was being eviscerated by Thatcherism, part of the Conservative government’s “family values” campaign that whipped up hysterical levels of homophobia when so many of her friends were ravaged by AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s, including Jarman who died in 1994, a year Swinton went to 43 funerals, all AIDS-related deaths, leaving lifelong scars that are so deep that it’s hard for her to return to London anymore.  Joanna Hogg, on the other hand, moved to Florence, Italy for a year to study photography before returning to London to work as an assistant to an advertising photographer in Soho, finding herself experimenting with the equipment on weekends, switching her focus to film school after discovering Derek Jarman’s Super 8 films, who gave her a camera to make her own Super 8 film PAPER (1982), a study of kinetic sculpture artist Ron Haselden for her entry into the National Film and Television School, where she resented how she was patronized by her all-male professors who created a learning environment that was generally hostile towards women.  After graduation, with few prospects of breaking into the film industry, she directed several music videos for artists such as Alison Moyet and Johnny Thunders in an era of punks and the art school cool of David Bowie, including Johnny Hates Jazz - Shattered Dreams (Official Music Video) YouTube (3:26) with 33 million views to date that reworked ideas from this graduation film, a stepping stone for a career in television over the next decade before she decided she needed to have more creative control, making her first feature film UNRELATED (2007) two decades after this thesis film was made, a straightforward character drama that is her least experimental work to date, winning praise as a “breakthrough” artist and “most promising newcomer” at nearly 50-years old.

Hogg’s relatively late career start as a feature filmmaker was an uneasy fit for most critics, too slow for commercial appeal, too psychologically remote for mainstream critics, also too white and upper class to have any contemporary relevance, yet there is always more to her films than what we see at first glance, often mystifying the viewer with its contradictory effects, as there’s something aesthetically internal that make them difficult to decipher.  But for sheer joy and unbridled enthusiasm, it’s hard to temper one’s appreciation for this short mixed media film, where our protagonist is literally swallowed up by the pages of a fashion magazine, which is a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, Alice in Wonderland - Falling down the rabbit hole YouTube (3:38), where you never know who or what you will encounter.  All shot on a single stage, where only the backdrops change, using a camera borrowed by Derek Jarman, the film is a comic satire on the world of product placement in fashion magazines, where everything is about selling wares to as many customers as possible, where this literally transports us directly into the imaginary universe of the magazine itself, with each product model literally beckoning us to buy what they’re selling, becoming an overwhelmingly crass experience, like an inescapable nightmare.  Yet the playfulness on display is endearing, especially when our guide through this magical mystery tour is none other than Tilda Swinton, with this film presenting both her and the director with their first chance at an artistic partnership, bonding together as boarding school students who “mutually loathed” private school, as it was designed to sculpt young minds for lives of privilege and produce bourgeois wives for the rich and powerful.  Like her other films, this mirrors her own personal experience, as Hogg was once caught smuggling a copy of Playgirl magazine into her West Heath dormitory, and the headmistress disciplined her by seating her in her office and asking her to turn every page of the magazine and offer commentary, which this film does in glorious color, a fusion of pop color with social critique, as embodied by Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 Choses que Je Sais d’Elle) (1967), opening up a phantasmagorical world to a bespectacled and shy woman named Lucky (Tilda Swinton), becoming a dark fantasia about the fashion-magazine industry, inspired by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES (1948) and Technicolor Hollywood musicals.  Lucky is a star-eyed young woman who is religiously obsessed by the glamor magazine Caprice, awaiting each new issue with a devoted fandom that knows no bounds, living and dying with each release, yet right from the outset the magazine cover girl (Rachel Byrd) speaks to her, inviting her inside, taking a zany dive into the surreal depths of 1980’s candy-colored pop and fashion culture, something of a cartoonish blend of comic touches and glam spectacle. 

Written by Hogg and David Gale, shot by David Tattersall, this whimsical film was not understood at the time, viewed as a superficial, juvenile exercise by her professors, the exact opposite of the more serious British social realism films being taught in film school, and can be seen as a declaration of Hogg’s independence, filtered through a postmodernist lens while filled with pizzazz and personality.  Stylistically ambitious, the film has elaborate sets and dramatic lighting, fusing the exuberance of the highly stylized singing and dancing in Chantal Akerman’s visionary GOLDEN EIGHTIES (1986) with the splendorous set pieces of Powell and Pressburger, climbing a grand staircase to heaven just like the one featured in Powell and Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946).  Lucky is thrust in the middle of a larger-than-life fashion magazine, suddenly finding herself trapped in the pages of the magazine that initially seems like her road to liberation, where a first glimpse of the gorgeous fashion models in a pastel-colored fantasy sequence elicits her response, “I just dream of looking like that,” immediately getting a makeover and given a chic look, where she’s literally ecstatic about the idea of rubbing elbows with the people she idolizes.  But as she moves through different articles of the magazine, she’s drawn deeper and deeper into a labyrinthean cave where she finds herself in a maze of photo shoots, perfume ads, fashion layouts, and society pages, with someone selling their products around every corner, all trying to trap her in their captivating world of commerce, including a Douglas Furbanks (Anthony Higgins) matinee idol, a male model in black-tie attire who romances her with suave caresses and kisses, yet she’s forced to continually keep on the move in what amounts to a vacuous consumerist wonderland, as she suddenly finds herself at odds with her own desires, moving from enchantment to disillusion.  Perhaps most telling is a sequence that amounts to an entire music video, with girls in colored dresses doing a fully choreographed dance routine in front of a nightclub as Jackie Jones (Helen Cooper), “the hippest music editor Caprice has ever had,” introduces her to Billy Pez (Robert Parnell), a Billy Idol lookalike singing Games We Play, but of course, he turns out to be a cad in real life, instantly turning her off with his supreme arrogance, as all she represents to him is a potential buyer.  Though dated by a synthesizer soundtrack that places the film in the 1980’s, viewers can still relate to what Lucky is going through, as it’s a different kind of transformation, where at the center of it are all the pressures thrown at young women to look and behave in a certain way.  In the end, Lucky is offered a dream job at her favorite fashion magazine, but rejects it because she’d rather keep her integrity intact than sell her soul to an industry that would crush it.  What’s important is the discovery of her own voice, demonstrating a feminist, formalist sensibility by standing up to these powerful forces, accentuating advertising’s corrosive effects on women’s consciousness and identity, as all the relationships on display are transactional and surface-level.  For Hogg, a young woman who loved fashion magazines, this eye-opening film helps us understand the dark side of what they represent to young women wanting desperately to be accepted.

Joanna Hogg’s Closet Picks  Criterion picks on YouTube (4:22)

Caprice (1986) on Vimeo  entire film may be seen on YouTube (27:50)

The Eternal Daughter

 

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER         B                                                                                   Great Britain  USA  (96 mi)  2022  d: Joana Hogg

I have a husband I neglect completely and I don’t have that much time left, and I don’t have a family beyond you.  I don’t have any children, I’m not going to have anybody to fuss over me when I’m your age.                                                                                                                        —Julie Harte talking to her mother Rosalind (both played by Tilda Swinton)

“No one wants to talk about mortality, and I regret to this day that I was never able to have that conversation with my mother,” Hogg confesses. “I was too fearful of it … I didn’t want to upset her by bringing it up.  But it would have been on her mind, and it would have maybe been a relief to have a conversation about it.  But it just didn’t happen.” (No One Wants to Talk About Mortality - The Atlantic).  From the maker of The Souvenir (2019) and THE SOUVENIR Part II (2021), with Tilda Swinton taking on a more grownup version of the role her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne played in those films, a fictionalized version of the director herself, with Tilda playing the mother, while this one features Tilda in both roles, playing mother and daughter, where you get to watch Tilda Swinton talk to Tilda Swinton in what amounts to a one-woman show.  Hogg collaborated with Swinton on her 1986 short graduation thesis film, Caprice, having known her since they were both ten year old boarding school students at the West Heath Girls’ School in 1971, the former boarding school of Princess Diana, while Hogg is also the godmother of Swinton’s daughter, each mentored by artist, poet, and filmmaker Derek Jarman, loaning Hogg her very first Super 8 camera which she used to make that first short film, only to collaborate again with Swinton on The Souvenir films, with this viewed as a finalizing coda, blurring the line between fiction and memoir.  This becomes a self-reflective memory piece on family and the limits of artistry, as sometimes the process of creating art trespasses into the personal and may have an unintended consequence, exposing family secrets that when released publicly take on a whole other life, creating open wounds that may never heal.  Martin Scorsese is an executive producer on all three films, where there is a printed conversation between them when this film was released, MARTIN SCORSESE AND JOANNA HOGG IN ....  Essentially a two woman film, with Swinton in both roles, this defies audience expectations, creating something minimalist, yet immediately recognizable, as it looks like something we’ve seen before, resembling the Gothic imagination of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), but without the nastiness.  In fact, the two women couldn’t be more polite, which has a way of smoothing over the rough edges, but the atmospheric surroundings constantly remind us of something deeply unsettling.  With a dark and moody opening, a car arrives in the darkness, as if immersing viewers onto the foggy moors of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011), resembling the somnambulistic quality of a Guy Maddin film, as it has that same neon green color scheme and melodramatic yet overly somber musical score, which happens to be Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Béla Bartók - Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, I YouTube (9:02), part of the background music used in Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), though the two films use different parts of it.  Yet it’s a haunted house movie, told in the old Gothic style, with a minimum of characters onscreen, mostly a woman and her elderly mother along with their dog (Tilda Swinton’s own Springer Spaniel), where they are seemingly the only guests staying at this old gargoyle-covered countryside hotel that seems tucked under bare trees in a foreboding landscape of dim lights and everpresent fog.  Shot during the isolation of the Covid pandemic on Super 16mm by Ed Rutherford, who also shot two of her earlier works, actually filmed at Soughton Hall in Wales, a 15-bedroom Georgian estate built in 1714 which has never been used in cinema before, though judging by all the peripheral noises and an everpresent camera exploring all the nooks and crannies, this eerily empty hotel appears to be haunted, as if something is constantly lurking nearby, where the omnipresent fog raises certain expectations, creating an environment that overwhelms so completely that it amounts to a character of its own.  But this is simply the framework of a story Hogg wishes to tell, which may be her most personal effort yet, but it’s concealed within a claustrophobic environment that is as telling as anything the characters have to say, literally sweeping viewers into this cacophony of discordant sounds and ominous imagery that is always shrouded in darkness, where the bottom line is that memories haunt us, creating a unique experience that couldn’t be more eerie and ominous, as if plunging us into the depths of the subconscious, out of which emanates a film about loss or impending loss, and an exploration of grief.    

Not much actually happens in this film, requiring a great deal of patience, offering only the barest outlines of a story, and much of that is filled with benevolently perfunctory conversations between mother and daughter, where you really have to dig deep to find meaningful material here, as so much of it plays out on the surface level, leaving plenty to the imagination, yet what’s unseen seems to haunt the living.  Julie is a middle-aged filmmaker taking her elderly mother Rosalind to Wales for her birthday (the same characters in The Souvenir), booking several days in an isolated old manor, a place her mother used to frequent, as it was once owned by her Aunt Jocelyn, spending plenty of her childhood there during an evacuation from the war while attempting to escape the bombs targeting nearby Liverpool, revisiting it many times even as a young woman.  But like many of these old homes in postwar Britain, due to taxes and increased expenses, they’ve been converted to country hotels, and while they promise peace and quiet in the comforts of the countryside, they immediately feel anxious when the chilly desk clerk, Carly Sophia-Davies, has no record of their reservation, or their request for a specific room overlooking the garden, instead she seems completely indifferent, having difficulty finding any available room, claiming the hotel is full of guests, even though they seem to be the only ones there.  Having the dining room to themselves, and the full run of the place, the clerk is equally disinterested about Julie’s request to close the windows and shutters in the rooms above them that seem to be continually banging from the wind, keeping her up all night, as she roams the empty corridors, with the clerk claiming none of the other guests have complained.  Immediately we question our perception of reality, as there’s obviously something going on behind the scenes, with the deadpan clerk absurdly adding a bit of levity to an overly somber film, as she seems constantly annoyed and reluctant to accommodate any of Julie’s requests, caught up, apparently, in her own personal struggles, occasionally seen arguing with a partner that is picking her up in a red sports car with the techno music cranked up as they are leaving the grounds.  While she brought her mother to an old familiar place in hopes it would trigger her memories for the film she wants to make, with each room reminding Rosalind of personal anecdotes she would never have thought of otherwise, she hopes to memorialize her mother before she dies by secretly recording their conversations.  Feeling guilty that this is done without asking consent, Rosalind is reluctant to share, finding herself easily distracted, not really providing the answers she is looking for, carrying a white plastic bag of letters and photographs that she intends to go through, while Julie spends her time working in the attic, the only place with a reliable Wi-Fi signal, making no headway at all on writing a screenplay, obscured by her own challenges, as she’s continually kept up all night, left ruminating on questions swirling in her head about the ghostly events that surround her in a lonely hotel without guests, becoming a film about the creative process and the emotional turmoil it involves.  Much of this is shot through mirror reflections, or long shots down empty hallways, with a spectral figure seen peering through the window, where it’s more suggestive than real, offering various versions of the self, never really addressing any of Rosalind’s concerns openly, as memories aren’t always clear and concise, and can feel muddled, as if lost in a haze, with only moments of clarity.  Nonetheless, Julie only wishes for her mother’s happiness, growing deeply distressed when she learns of so many sorrowful recollections, with memories of war and tragic loss, including a miscarriage, leaving her filled with regret, unaware of the heavy weight she’s been carrying, which may explain her writer’s block, growing deeply uncomfortable, a manifestation of something a younger version of her character Julie says in SOUVENIR II, “I don’t want to see life as it was.  I want to see life as I imagine it to be.”  Filtering someone else’s life through our own existential prism, it only accentuates what we don’t know or understand about those we love, as reality often conflicts with our ideas of the truth.             

While this film made plenty of Best of the Year lists, listed at #3 by Reverse Shot, Best Films of 2022 Reverse Shot, and #5 by the Film Comment poll, Film Comment Announces 2022 Best-of-Year Lists, it’s not an easy watch, particularly finding something substantive out of it, as it definitely loses something if not seen in theaters, where it might otherwise feel overly dark, with so much hidden underneath the tapestry of spooky images, borrowing heavily from the British horror tradition, including Jacques Tourneur’s fog-shrouded NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957), Jack Clayton’s superb adaptation of the Henry James ghost story The Turn of the Screw in The Innocents (1961), Herbert Wise’s ghost story THE WOMAN IN BLACK (1989), and of course Stanley Kubrick’s haunted house thriller THE SHINING (1980), which was shot in England.  The use of horror recalls the deeply buried resentments in Ingmar Bergman’s Bergman, Two from the 70's: Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten) (1978), featuring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann as mother and daughter, veering into shockingly unexpected emotional outbursts, while this is a portrait of Hogg’s relationship with her own mother, who died while she was editing the film, leaving her plagued by guilt, associating the film with her death, making this her version of Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015).  Essentially a film about women whose problems manifest as failures of expression, suppressed desires, and thwarted ambitions, the idea began back in 2008 when Hogg was planning a film about her relationship with her mother, but she was too close at the time, unnerved by the idea of poking around exploring very painful memories, but the passage of time allowed her to consider a different way of approaching the subject, knowing she would make a film about it one day, recalling “We often went on trips together to stay at hotels, sometimes near relatives, and so it was very directly taken from that experience with her.”  Swinton is understated throughout, providing the needed believability in each character, a stabilizing force in stark contrast to the impressionistic maze of Gothic horror that is a constant visual motif, with suggestions of a supernatural presence hovering nearby, which may be a metaphor for death, and while nothing jumps out of the dark striking fear in anyone’s heart, the horror of memory is everpresent here.  While Julie tries her best to care for her mother, she is shocked at her mother’s reactions to a return to what was a family estate, flooding her memories with an overwhelming rush of sad emotions, leaving Julie disheartened, wondering what she’s done bringing her there, but her mother is more firmly grounded, reminding her daughter, “That’s what rooms do.  They hold these stories.”  From an imagination perspective, this film is wonderfully impressionistic, offering fleeting memories, but also long-forgotten correspondences, worn-out paperbacks, long walks with the dog, and formal dining in an empty room, with only four things on the menu, catered to by the disinterested desk clerk who always seems to intrude at the exact wrong moment, invariably interrupting their train of thought, though they always insist they are having a “very lovely time,” leaving things in a state of paralysis, as if stuck in time.  The birthday dinner itself is surreal, with Julie meticulously wanting things done a certain way, becoming anxiously exact, but when the moment arrives the film swerves in a different direction, altering the look of reality, challenging our perceptions, and infusing a different understanding of the mother/daughter relationship which is at the heart of the film.  It’s clear that you can know someone without really knowing them, as evidenced by this family home that was once filled with importance and life, but transformed over time to an empty vessel, a decaying remnant of what it once was, where the physical space of the building is a ghostly presence.  Looking upon our pasts, and the people that matter to us, an emotional chasm exists between how we remember the past and the present, with all its complications.  Memory is fluid, as it comes and goes, never straightforward, which may explain the multiple shots of mirror reflections, working with more close-ups, allowing the characters’ reactions to be observed in greater detail, adding an existential element, and a different version of autobiographical filmmaking, as there’s something unknowable about this hotel and its inhabitants, and a tremendous gulf between the conversations we would like to have with our mothers and daughters, and the ones we actually end up having.