AGE-C’S THIRD LECTURE FOR THE CORNELIA GOETHE COLLOQUIUM

Ghosts of Futures Past: Revising The Eternal Daughter

Preparing for my November conference at the Cornelia Goethe Center in Frankfurt was a perfect opportunity to revisit one of my favorite films from last year, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, through the lens of the AGE-C project. The Eternal Daughter is some sort of follow-up to Hogg’s autobiographical diptych The Souvenir (2019-2020), in which Honor Swinton-Byrne, Tilda Swinton’s daughter, played Julie, an alter ego of the director while Swinton portrayed her mother Rosalind. In this film seemingly set thirty years after the events described in The Souvenir and shot in secret during lockdown, Tilda Swinton takes on both roles, as an ageing Julie takes her elderly mother to a secluded hotel which was formerly Rosalind’s family home. Julie plans to use their stay in order to record Rosalind’s memories in preparation of a film she is writing about her but, to her dismay, Rosalind’s walk down memory lane proves to be more unpleasant than expected as the death of a family member during the war or the miscarriage of her first child come back to her mind. Towards the end of the film, we realize that Rosalind was in fact never there with Julie, as she has already passed.

The purpose of my talk in Frankfurt was to discuss what Timothy Shary and Nancy McVittie eloquently refer to as “grayface” performances, which are often used in the biopic genre in order to allow a performer to portray a character at different stages of the life path. Joanna Hogg has a light-handed approach to artificial ageing in comparison with most of those films. As Rosalind, Tilda Swinton wears a white wig and stipples are used to mark wrinkles around her eyes and mouth; a discrete prosthetic signals the apparition of a turkey neck. Apart from that, most differences between mother and daughter come from costume (Rosalind wears turtlenecks, pleated skirts and support stockings) and make-up – a skin is powdered with a very white foundation, darker purple and pink touches help highlight bag under her eyes, make her cheeks hollower and her lips thinner. But it’s really Swinton’s subtle performance – that will no doubt surprise those who have seen her histrionic performances of old age in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel or Bong Joohn-Ho’s Snowpiercer – that brings both characters to life. More than her attitudes, it’s the alteration of her voice that seems particularly vivid in her incarnation of Rosalind, not only because of its slight coarseness but because of the way her speech is punctuated by incongruous pauses or repetitions evocative of old age (« If you can think of a … nice way of saying it, I think it would be… wonderful”. “Very very good… marmalade.”).

The relative sobriety of this ageing incarnation suggests a greater focus on character rather than performer that manifests itself in the film’s (and Julie’s) refusal to freeze Rosalind’s image into a figure associated with decline and decay. This way of relying on subtle performance touches rather than on heavy prosthetics helps individualizing Rosalind’s character, making her more of a well-rounded character than a generic figure of old age – a fact that is reinforced by the personal nature of the memories she recounts to her daughter and the intimacy of their conversations. Throughout the film, we get several short glimpses of Julie’s hand stroking a severely aged hand, with deformed fingers, strong veins and brown spots. Only at the end of the narrative are we shown the scene that this image comes from, in which we see Julie taking care of a severely aged Rosalind, lying on her death bed in a night gown, her face heavily deformed by wrinkles and her eyes half-closed, as if she’s barely conscious. This image of decay is seemingly held back from the film as well as from Julie’s consciousness: the memory of her mother that the character wants to remember is not this picture of death and decrepitude but the importance of the singular relationship that existed between them.

At the same time, this individualization of Rosalind is tempered by the way the film negotiates the copresence of two iterations of the same body in different parts. While Julie and Rosalind are kept in separate frames for almost all the duration of the film (except when they are filmed in mirrors), their physical resemblance as well as the circulation of jewelry (pearl hearings) and accessories (their matching glasses, the mother’s pill box) between them suggest a more blurry line between the identities of mother and daughter – a feeling increased by Tilda Swinton’s ambiguous star persona as an inscrutable genderless, ageless, sexually ambiguous figure able to dissolve into many identities. Similarly, the film builds an ambiguity about the temporality of their conversations – are they memories from a previous stay at the hotel, at the time when Rosalind was alive, or are they just figments of Julie’s imagination? Past and present seem to blend in the eerie fog surrounding the mansion.

The last conversation between Julie and Rosalind’s “ghost” suggests that her apparition is not only a way for Julie to grieve her mother, but also a manner for her to reflect on her own ageing as she is entering into old age herself. Rosalind is both a mirror of what Julie will become soon and a testimony of what she never was: a mother. Julie is haunted by the perspective of growing lonely into old age without a daughter to care for her the way she did care for her Rosalind. Through the dual embodiment of mother and daughter by Swinton, old age is not depicted as a distinct, separate time of life opposed to youth and synonymous with death and decrepitude. Swinton’s artificially aged body is a reassuring presence, a friendly face coming from the past and an alter ego guiding the heroine towards the future, not a figure of Otherness or a threatening prophecy. As Julie lets go of her mother’s ghost and fully surrenders to her grief, the mist surrounding the hotel suddenly lifts: the past finally recedes, to make way for what’s to come.

Written by: Dr. Alexandre Moussa

Image credit: still from The Eternal Daughter (2022), director Joanna Hogg, ©Condor Distribution

Here you can also find the audio recording of the lecture: