By no means am I on the green branch with the acclaimed British filmmaker Joanna Hogg, whose predecessor, “The Souvenir” was so incredibly boring, tiring and pretentious that I didn’t even try to watch its sequel. Anyway, I decided to watch her “Eternal Daughter”, but it was even more irritating and boring, and this mysterious drama really annoyed me. Once again, Hogg reached into her own life and experiences and made a film about the relationship of a middle-aged filmmaker with her mother, and Tilda Swinton played both the filmmaker and her mother. Following Marcel Proust’s footsteps, Hogg tried to search for lost time and reminisce about her relationship with her mother, whom she obviously constantly tried to please and try to make her happy and satisfied, and it seemed to her that she never appreciated it.
Julie (Swinton) traveled with her old mother (Swinton) to a typical British old-fashioned hotel that looks like a typical country house from Downton Abbey or Gosford Park. She arrived there to write a film about her relationship with her mother and is trying to find out some details from her life, especially her youth. She didn’t choose that somewhat gothic hotel by chance, because her mother lived there for a while when she was young, but it always seemed like something would distract Julie from the job she had envisioned. There is also a rather unpleasant and unfriendly receptionist who also works in the restaurant and it seems as if her mentor was Rick Mayall’s character from “Guest House Paradiso”.
Although Hogg is trying to achieve a gothic vibe and “The Eternal Daughter” was shot in an old fashioned way, it was so boring. It’s an old building that constantly creaks, whines, the wind blows through the windows, Julie can’t sleep, so she walks around with her dog at night, and occasionally she thinks that something is out there and she gets scared. It’s a stream-of-consciousness film in which almost nothing happens in the literal sense, and just as Julie is in a creative block and can’t start writing a screenplay about life with her mother and can’t decide on a certain concept, I have the impression that she’s in such a Hogg was also in the situation. But that didn’t stop her from making a movie about almost nothing, a movie that seems like some kind of idea that she herself isn’t sure what to do with.
