'The eternal daughter': the British Joanna Hogg, a reference of European cinema, arrives in Spanish cinemas with her muse, Tilda Swinton

2023-05-12T11:07:50.033Z

Highlights: The filmmaker explores mother-child bonds from autofiction and beyond the limits of reality. After her extraordinary autobiographical diptych The Souvenir I and II (2019-2021), the British Joanna Hogg, at 63 years old, has become a reference filmmaker on the European scene. His new film, La hija eterna, opens in Spanish commercial theaters outside the festival circuit. An event that finally vindicates an author capable of endowing her images with elegance and mystery because they are built from the weight of experience and life.

The filmmaker explores mother-child bonds from autofiction and beyond the limits of reality

After her extraordinary autobiographical diptych The Souvenir I and II (2019-2021), the British Joanna Hogg, at 63 years old, has become a reference filmmaker on the European scene. His new film, La hija eterna, opens in Spanish commercial theaters outside the festival circuit. An event that finally vindicates an author capable of endowing her images with elegance and mystery because they are built from the weight of experience and life, the latter understood as a creative act.

More information

Joanna Hogg's brilliant autofiction

The eternal daughter is united by the umbilical cord of autofiction with her two previous films and that is why it is convenient to remember where the main characters of a story that explores mother-child love beyond the limits of reality are born, reminding us in a beautiful and painful way of the unfathomable enigma of a bond marked by love, But also because of an inevitable fear: for a daughter her mother is a mirror not easy to cross without being trapped for life.

The main character of The Souvenir I and II was Julie Hart, alter ego of the director who evoked her beginnings in film school and in the London of the eighties through an idyll marked by the tragedy of heroin. Tilda Swinton and her daughter in real life, Honor Swinton Byrne, played mother-daughter in their youth to now take a triple somersault in time to travel to the maturity of the daughter-filmmaker and the old age of her sober and phlegmatic mother, both unfolded this time in a huge Swinton.

The eternal daughter is situated in the territory of the supernatural and phantasmagorical because that is also the maternal-filial relationships, an arcane full of secret corners. A place that refers to another recent film, the delicate Petite maman, a masterpiece by the French Céline Sciamma that captured with an unusual poetics the mother-daughter grief before orphanhood. Hogg, from the vulnerable gaze of maturity, and Sciamma, from the tender childish audacity, investigate an affective knot that cinema has dealt with, above all, from drama and melodrama, or from pathologies to Grey Gardens, and not so much from the incomparable love that these filmmakers invoke from the walls of an old family house.

More information

Read the film reviews

In the case of The Eternal Daughter, the domestic is represented by the weight of tradition through a mansion. A space converted into a hotel but still full of memories and ancestors. A labyrinth of doors and corridors that allow the viewer to navigate through time, moods and emotions of two women faced with their inseparable story. There, mother and daughter will look at each other straight ahead without daring to look at each other, accompanied at all times by a dog that Hogg's mastery makes a key element to guide us between the layers of a film in which identity is also linked to beautiful animal loyalty, an idea that, for example, it also crosses the cinema of the American Kelly Reichardt, and not only when her dog Lucy lived. Wrapped in the beauty of a Gothic tale, between the trompe l'oeil of fabric walls and heavy curtains, The Eternal Daughter speaks of the living and the dead and of a woman who walks through that burrow, real or figurative, that a mother always inhabits.