“Five years ago I felt like a pioneer. Now I'm not anymore thanks to #MeToo "

One day in the early eighties, Joanna Hogg (London, 61 years old) was, taken by her boyfriend, to see a painting in the London museum The Wallace Collection: The Souvenir (The memory), by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the genius of rococo insignificance. "I'm still trying to understand why he took me," says this filmmaker today. The protagonist of that painting was named Julie, like the protagonist of

(2019) and

(2021), the autobiographical diptych that has given Hogg the attention he has been denied for years despite his three celebrated previous films (

, 2007;

, 2010; and

, 2013). In that frame, Hogg not only found the title of his films, but also the excuse of the narration built from memories, and fixed the great mystery that has taken him almost four decades to unravel: that boyfriend, addicted to heroin, the relationship conflict they maintained and his sudden death.

The lack of knowledge she had about him and how much it affected her when she was still a film student were the starting point of a story that she began to think about in the late eighties. A decade later she took it out of the drawer again and two decades later she found the way: it wasn't him she had to investigate, but herself. "Part of the impetus that led me to write it was the lack of a female perspective in cinema, the need to see the journey of a woman who wants to be a director in a world of men," she explained at the last Cannes Festival, where presented the second part (no release date in Spain). “I felt like a pioneer when I started writing it six or seven years ago. Now I'm not anymore, thanks to Time's Up and #MeToo."

Hogg conceived the two films at the same time, "the same story divided in two", and hoped to shoot them in a row, thanks in part to the support as executive producer of Martin Scorsese ("if it isn't for his trust, I don't know", he sighs. ). But since in the end he had to distance himself from filming due to lack of money, with the second part he has had time to reassess his memory and his emotions. If

was a not absolutely realistic reconstruction of what he lived through,

It has ended up being, according to her, “a film about what it was like to shoot the first part”. “It was a complete physical and emotional reaction for me: seeing the apartment I lived in during those years rebuilt on set thanks to the photographs I had taken at the time and even using some of the furniture or objects I still keep, rereading my diaries, revisiting my shorts”, she explains very calmly, but still trying to understand what these two films have meant to her. "It's weird because I work so much on instinct that when I do something I immediately forget how I did it, but I know that I tend to turn the experiences that have mortified me the most into something positive and, therefore, creative." That's Hogg's way of saying that the movies have somehow saved her.

The job Julie graduates from film school in

is one the director would have wanted to dare to do at that age. Hogg shot

(1986), her first short film, with her friend Tilda Swinton as the protagonist who stood up for moral reasons before the demands of a fashion magazine director. A brave statement then and that seems to have been the forced path of Joanna Hogg to reach this late success and this peculiar closing of the vital and professional circle: when they filmed it, Swinton was an unknown but here she is now, next to Hogg, interpreting in both

to Julie's mother, played by her daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne (Hogg's goddaughter).

It is an intricate game of mirrors of reality and fiction, memory and actuality.

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