Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The star of Joanna Hogg’s latest film is a handbag. “I should introduce myself,” it announces, in Italian, from its slightly forlorn perch overlooking the surrounding hills. The bag is greying and slightly scruffy. “I am a handbag near the end of my life,” it continues. “And I wish to tell you my story…”Autobiografia di una Borsetta tells the story of Miu Miu’s The Wander, and its journey from the factory floor where it is “touched” into life by its “Mother”, and through the many hands that possess it thereafter, from an impressionable lovestruck young teen, via a street hawker and to its lonely end sitting in a field. It’s a sad little tale, shot from the bag’s perspective: the camera is often positioned from within the bag so that we see the world through the narrow oval of its opening. And although it makes a romantic eulogy to one of Miu Miu’s most coveted accessories, it’s also a gentle commentary on the lifespan of a product, the emotional value of our personal effects and the whims of fashionability and desire. The film marks the 29th Miu Miu Women’s Tales, an ongoing series of short films inaugurated in 2011 and designed to celebrate creativity in film and the empowerment of women. Hogg joins filmmakers Mati Diop, Agnès Varda, Ava DuVernay, Naomi Kawase and Lynne Ramsay as the latest contributor to one of the brand’s most prestigious cultural programmes (the film premieres this month). “We all know Joanna is one of the leading filmmakers of our time and we are very happy that she has joined the Miu Miu Women’s Tales family,” says Miuccia Prada. “The way she portrays and examines relationships and the souls of her characters is unique and profoundly human.”For Hogg, the film was an opportunity to flex a new directorial muscle. The 64-year-old director is celebrated for a taut oeuvre of seven films – including Unrelated and Archipelago, and the more autobiographical The Souvenir – that have focused on quiet but emotionally devastating dramas set among the upper middle class. Autobiografia marked two new developments: Hogg shot it herself, as her own cinematographer, and she collaborated with an Italian cast and crew, working entirely in another language.“I’ve been really trying to move out of my own cinema, move out of working within a particular media,” says Hogg in a clear, perfectly enunciated RP that my AI transcription service can interpret to the comma. “I feel I’m always typecast now as working within a certain part of the class system, which I really hate, right? Very like an actor being typecast, you know? You want to break out into new territory.” She is speaking from her kitchen near Rome while she is finishing the edit. It’s part of “a new experiment” that sees her living between London and Italy with her partner, the visual artist Nick Turvey. She seems unconvinced about the benefits of dual habitation, though she speaks fluent Italian (her debut feature Unrelated was shot in a villa outside Siena where Hogg once stayed while taking a painting course). It’s all part of her latest plan to try and be more “brave”.The Miu Miu commission offered her an opportunity – and a challenge. “The fantastic thing about this very open brief is that I see Miu Miu, or I see Mrs Prada, as somebody very adventurous, you know, not afraid to try new ideas. And I thought, OK, well, that’s like a command to be brave and do something different to what you normally do.”Wearing a navy sweater, her hair tied back, with big spectacles, Hogg possesses a handsome beauty. She is a keen follower of fashion and though she may not be a Miu Miu girl exactly (the red top worn in this shoot is something of a departure as it’s so “fitted”), she is avowedly a Prada woman – she bought her first nylon Prada handbag in the 1980s when they first launched. “I do think a lot about what I’m going to wear,” she says of her style. When directing she likes to stick to a fairly utilitarian uniform. She is very preoccupied by the “tactility” of clothes. And that nothing be too tight. “As I grew up, my 20s were in the 1980s and gender was something quite fluid then. I always felt very comfortable wearing Mrs Prada’s clothes because they weren’t super-feminine or oversexualised. They just felt very comfortable and very yourself.”Likewise, Hogg’s films have always been filled with emotional baggage. From the wheely suitcase that the unhappy Anna trundles up the path in Unrelated to the crumpled plastic bag of mysterious ephemera that Tilda Swinton’s Rosalind carries with her at all times in The Eternal Daughter, Hogg’s films have a delicious specificity that anchors her characters in a clear social milieu. The daughter of John Hogg, who was the vice-chairman of a large insurance company, and Sarah Noel-Buxton, from a prominent English family, she grew up in an environment of intellectual depth and privilege near the town of Tunbridge Wells. As such, her films have been an extraordinary chronicle of class anxieties and Britishisms, all observed with an almost forensic understanding of social mores, sensible skirts and stocky shoes. Nevertheless, she credits the idea for Autobiografia di una Borsetta to her friend John David Rhodes, professor of film and visual studies at Cambridge University, whom she first met in 2015. Rhodes has co-written a book with Elena Gorfinkel about the cinematic prop, which will be published this spring. Hogg saw an early draft when he asked her for a blurb. “It’s a really interesting book about how we see objects,” says Hogg. “It goes from Douglas Sirk and the objects in his films to, you know, the way Bresson uses the prop… And then I thought, well, OK, what are the props in fashion? And obviously the handbag is one. I find handbags very appealing anyway – they are wonderful because they tend to change hands.” (In the footnotes of the script sent with a rough cut of the Autobiografia, Hogg writes: “The handbag is the ultimate Bressonian model; expressionless, allowing us to imprint ourselves onto the bag, yet baring its soul to the camera.”)Rhodes is equally effusive about Hogg. “I have always been interested in the specificity of places and objects in [Joanna’s] work, which always exhibits a fierce attachment to the particular,” he says, via email. “But it was on the set [of Souvenir II] that I had a sort of epiphany about how Joanna uses props… In the room that had been converted into a makeshift store room for the film, there was a shelf with a paper note stuck to it that read ‘Joanna’s personal props – Do not touch!’…“Prop is short for property. So the props stored on those shelves were really personal, I suppose. Joanna often populates her films with things that she herself has actually lived with and handled. I think there is a real concreteness to her practice, and an intelligence about how things mediate, enable, expand our lives, or perform the same functions for how to tell a story.”In some ways, the Autobiografia makes an excellent companion piece to Caprice, Hogg’s first 27-minute graduate film, made in 1986, and currently available on Mubi. That film is a phantasmagorical satire, starring Tilda Swinton as a young fashion enthusiast who enters the pages of her favourite glossy magazine only to discover the fantasy world she so admires is in fact narrow-minded, venal and rather sad. In a wonderful irony, the world of Caprice, with its pastel satins and mid-’80s artifice, now looks powerfully dated, while Swinton, then about 26, radiant, make-up free, and wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, looks like a model in the current Miu Miu campaign. Hogg has known Swinton since childhood. Their parents were family friends, and the pair attended the same school, the famously highbrow but unacademic West Heath, in Sevenoaks, also attended by the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Swinton starred in the Souvenir films, with her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne, as well as playing both mother and daughter in The Eternal Daughter. The actress and director share the same brisk energy, poise and slight ferocity. Asked if Swinton is her muse, Hogg wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know. What does muse mean exactly? Good question. Tilda and I have just a very long, long, deep friendship,” says Hogg. “And we’ve got so many frames of reference in common. So it’s sort of beyond that somehow. That was what was so special about The Eternal Daughter… we couldn’t have done it with anybody else… Sometimes it was almost like it was just she and I making the film. Of course, there was everybody around us supporting us. But it was very intimate and very, very special. And I think, if it was possible, it deepened our friendship.” The Women’s Tales series might be a nice commercial fillip for an independent artist, but Hogg’s ambitions for the project were pure. Hogg is inspired by Miuccia Prada’s “adventurous” spirit. In what way? “She’s adventurous in what she’s doing in terms of supporting artists and exhibitions,” says Hogg. “She’s allowing people to have different ideas, to have their own voice. And she’s not afraid of ideas. She’s not afraid of politics. She just seems very fearless. And what she designs in her clothes… there’s a fearlessness there, as well.”Hogg often talks about her own lack of confidence – “I think I’m very brave in my personal life, but I don’t feel like I’m a confident person at all,” she exclaims. Nevertheless, her films have become more autobiographical with time, and with them a degree of self-revelation that some might find terribly exposing. It must take a degree of bravery, for example, to offer a recording of a therapy session done in the aftermath of a personal tragedy to an actor so that they might better understand a scene.“Maybe my bravery can be expressed creatively,” concedes Hogg, who did precisely that when filming The Souvenir. “But, I think the heart of my creativity has got to be a bit shaky and uncertain and maybe a bit dark or something, you know?” The next step for Hogg would be to make a full feature in an environment, like she did in Rome, that feels strange and unfamiliar. She would also like to make a film set in LA. I wonder if Hogg feels herself a maker of “women’s tales”? She pauses. “In my life. I’m not thinking, I’m a woman. I don’t… So I tend to identify myself as a woman, but I’m just me wanting to express my ideas. I’m not tailoring them to something…” she stops. Many of her films have drawn on the themes of childlessness and responsibility that seem uniquely female in some way. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m particularly feminine,” she argues. “I don’t mean that I’m androgynous, but I’m not aware of seeing the world from a female perspective.”Later, we talk about this film awards season and how a number of female directors have looked at the experience of “older” women on screen. Films such as The Substance, Babygirl and The Last Showgirl have reignited long-worn conversations about female sexuality and commercial currency, especially in the world of entertainment. Having said that she’s not especially interested in seeing things from a woman’s point of view, I wonder if there’s anything she’d like to contribute to that dialogue?“Funnily enough, I have noticed that there have been some films this year that have been talking about women ageing, and women of a certain age,” she laughs. “And it’s ignited in me a desire to make a film that, actually, I wanted to make about 20 years ago. Well, I’m not going to talk and tell the story because I might go ahead and make the film. But anyway, it’s all around that subject. What I felt wasn’t being expressed in those films, that I feel passionate about wanting to express, is to do with women ageing and wanting to see another side of that, that I haven’t seen.”Something a bit greyer and sadder? Something that doesn’t focus solely on a woman’s sexual attractiveness? Or neuroses? Or desirability? “Something that shows a respect for someone who’s getting older,” she counters. “Not seeing it as the worst thing that can happen.”A film about a woman ageing, without any emotional baggage? Now that would be brave.
