What is The Souvenir? In Joanna Hogg’s autobiographically inspired 2019 drama, that title appeared to refer specifically to an 18th-century Fragonard painting depicting a young woman carving the name of her lover into a tree trunk. In that film, set in the 1980s, Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne) is introduced to the painting by an enigmatic man with whom she is falling in love. Like Hogg, Julie is perplexed by what the painting means and by her own increasingly tumultuous feelings for her mysterious companion.

In this flipside second installment of Hogg’s most personal and surprisingly most accessible work, the word “souvenir” takes on a rather more metatextual meaning. This time the film itself becomes a kind of cinematic keepsake, a memory of a memory set in the aftermath of Julie’s relationship with the heroin-addicted Anthony. An overwhelming presence in the first episode, as portrayed by Tom Burke, Anthony is now an even more confounding absence, leaving Julie struggling to make sense of their former life together, with all its mysteries and misdirections.

More significantly, The Souvenir Part II finds Julie finding herself, embracing her own future as a film-maker even as she wrestles with the ghosts of the past.

Facing the prospect of having to make her film-school graduation project while still reeling from the fallout of her doomed relationship, Julie channels her personal experiences into a free-form script (a “memorial”) that baffles and irks her tutors. Meanwhile, creative battles also engulf Julie’s fellow film students, most notably wannabe auteur Patrick (Richard Ayoade).

As for the film Julie is making, at times it appears that we are watching a Pirandello-esque behind-the-scenes doc about the making of The Souvenir, viewed through a kaleidoscopic maze of self-reflection. Just as Julie tells her tutors that she’s no longer interested in showing life “as it plays out” but rather “as I imagine it”, so Hogg also uses an audacious cinematic sleight of hand to conjure yet another movie-within-the-movie, revisiting events that we have previously seen portrayed with uncanny realism, but here reimagined as fantastical flights of fancy that owe a debt to the dreamy dance sequences of old-school Hollywood musicals.

Watching parts I and II back to back, they do miraculously come together as a coherent whole, an adventurous meditation on the alchemical process of making life imitate art and vice versa.