Joanna Hogg's most recent film "The Souvenir" has been hailed as a masterpiece although personally I think it's a little too precious for masterpiece status. For me, her real masterpiece is her debut film "Unrelated" in which a group of truly appalling people, (an extended family and their friend, Anna), spend a summer together in Tuscany. The film is scripted and the people on screen are, mostly, actors but it could be a documentary or even an autopsy as Hogg dissects their lives in close-up. Seldom have people I despised as much on film proved to be so fascinating and it's entirely down to Hogg's superlative direction and the extraordinary performances of the cast.
A young, and as then totally unknown, Tom Hiddleston is utterly brilliant as the oldest of the children and the one the guest, Anna, (an equally brilliant Kathryn Worth), takes a fancy to only to be rejected. As a director Hogg couldn't cut these people anymore deeply than if she used a scalpel instead of a camera.(Presumably she doesn't like them any more than I do but it's clear she knows them intimately). This is 'proper' cinema; this is cinema used for a purpose. You may find the characters and even the film itself reprehensible but I defy anyone to deny its brilliance.
Joanna Hogg's most recent film "The Souvenir" has been hailed as a masterpiece although personally I think it's a little too precious for masterpiece status. For me, her real masterpiece is her debut film "Unrelated" in which a group of truly appalling people, (an extended family and their friend, Anna), spend a summer together in Tuscany. The film is scripted and the people on screen are, mostly, actors but it could be a documentary or even an autopsy as Hogg dissects their lives in close-up. Seldom have people I despised as much on film proved to be so fascinating and it's entirely down to Hogg's superlative direction and the extraordinary performances of the cast.
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