‘The Eternal Daughter’ by Joanna Hogg and Starring Tilda Swinton Plays Venice, Toronto and New York Film Festival 2022*

How did this emotional sketch become a movie? Tilda Swinton and Joanna Hogg, born on March 20, 1960 in London, England, UK and known for writing and directing The Souvenir (2019), The Souvenir: Part II (2021) and Unrelated (2007), all produced by Emma Norton of JWH Films, are favored by the charmed circle of rich white seemingly heterosexual men like Martin Scorsese (Sikelia Productions), David Fenkel and Daniel Katz (A24), and British vet producer Ed Guiney (Element Pictures). This is all conjuncture on my part, as it was when I wrote about the deal behind Triangle of Sadness, but the sketchiness of this and the formulaic quality of Triangle, coupled with the stellar names of those involved in the production lead me to believe there was more to the making of the movie deal than there is to the movie itself. In The Eternal Daughter, these men have chosen to celebrate womanhood as expressed by a particular female filmmaker as she attempts to create a story about herself and her mother plus one kindly black bereaved man played by Joseph Mydell (there is a hint of something about slavery here) and a cold modern young woman played by Carly-Sophia Davies whose heart also melts at the pathos of the celebate and lonely filmmaker, who actually is not pathetic but apparently just creatively alive. Watch the trailer here and then watch the movie and judge for yourself: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13874422/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 Together these men must have brought the film to Kristin Irving of the BBC where it got made, somewhat along the same lines as highly touted The Souvenir which landed BBC Films with funds from BFI Film Fund and was also produced by JWH Films, again in association with Scorsese’s incubator Sikelia. This time Protagonist Pictures was the international sales agent and A24 only distributed in North America. Its sequel, The Souvenir Part II stars real-life mother and daughter Tilda Swinton and Honor Swinton Byrne, a conceit which perhaps gave life to the idea of another mother-and-daughter movie in which both roles are played by Tilda Swinton and which was made by the same team plus Ed Guiney of Element Pictures. A24 has now taken on both international sales and US rights. All of these films must have made 2 cents at the box office. What’s up? What is Tilda Swinton herself up to these days? Her previous film Three Thousand Years of Yearning by stalwart filmmaker George Miler sold to more interternational distributors in 2021 and 2022 than the JWH films did, but it still must not have fared much better at the box office. (Read my blon on that here.) The short by Almodovar, The Human Voice, was a little gem, showing off Swinton’s accomplished acting skills as she enacted the remake of Cocteau’s The Human Voice under strict COVID protocols. But none of these reaches the new heights always expected of her…We’ll see what her next four films The End (pre-production) by Joshua Oppenheimer, Asteroid City (post-production) by Wes Anderson, The Killer (post-production) by David Fincher, and an Untitled Julio Torres Project (post-production) bring to the audiences who eagerly await whatever she does (count me among them). The Eternal Daughter has been described as a mystery drama and as a ghost story about “a middle-aged daughter and her elderly mother who confront long-buried secrets when they return to their former family home, a once-grand manor that has become a nearly vacant hotel brimming with mystery.” But there are no ghosts nor is there much of a mystery beyond why a mother and daughter have an eternal and universal tension between them, as most mothers and daughters do. Nor is the nearly vacant hotel ever revealed to be the ancestral home, nor is there much of a mystery about a banging shutter which keeps Tilda the daughter up at night. And whence cometh the acclaim of Joanna Hogg? Perhaps it was COVID. Dare I argue with the top film festivals and critics whom Rotten Tomatoes scored at 95%? Who are these critics? How many males among them? All Swinton has to do is attach her name to a project and it will be made — with male money. The film does truly touch emotions felt by every daughter trying to hard to please a mother who cannot express her own desires or her own heartfelt love for her daughter. But this situation makes the daughter seem pathetic except in her own creative mind as she grapples with the dilemna of The Eternal Duaghter. But what is the story here? That a writer’s imagination trumps reality? Are we so starved for emotional experiences that such a sketch brings us to tears? Am I horribly out of touch with the universe? Another film which touches this same raw nerve is Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun. Where have I gone wrong? Compare this to Eo, a film with no ersatz emotion and created to produce an emotion the director Jerzy Skolomowski had not felt since he saw Au Hasard Balthazar in 1966. Read my blog and his quotations. I am longing for the days of Angelopoulos, of Terence Davies or even Peter Greenaway. Give me hard art, not oblique emotional sketches, playing like the little musical phrase that Proust’s Swann held so dear as a reminder of his lost love. Postscript: An interesting article by Carlos Aguilar appeared in the LA Times shortly after I published this. It explains the long friendship between Tilda Swinton and Joanna Hogg. At first I thought it negated my negative take on the deal, but on second reading, I decided that it only added another tier to the dealmaking process which is that Tilda swings her own weight and can bring in her friend to the circle of dealmaking whereas before, Hogg remained in the background of the art film world.