Forties screen star

All of a sudden, British film has a new master. The debut feature of Joanna Hogg, 47, Unrelated, was released on Friday and, having won last year's London Film Festival International Critics' award, it has now united the critics in rapture.

The Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm stopped just short of proclaiming its director an "auteur" and claimed it reaches the parts "where other British movies don't go", while the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw declared Hogg has "genuine cinematic artistry". Even The Sun, not known for praising art-house films, raved about it.

And yet the shock is not the praise — as a feature debut, it's staggeringly accomplished, more like the work of a European art-house director than anything homegrown. The real surprise is why it took Hogg so long to get round to making it.

It is almost 30 years since she first arrived in Soho, determined to make her mark on the film world. The road to Unrelated leads from the avant-garde master Derek Jarman, an early mentor, to middle-aged heartache, via such everyday TV suburbs as Holby and Walford.

The film tells the story of Anna (Kathryn Worth), a fragile 40-year-old who, as Hogg explains, is "unhappy in her own skin, who has never taken responsibility for her life and is drifting like a teenager. And because of this has missed the opportunity of having children".

Taking a break in an old friend's Tuscan holiday home, Anna is thrust into the midst of a noisy, confident middle-class tribe and teeters on the brink of a relationship with her friend's teenage son, Oakley (an impressive big-screen debut by Tom Hiddleston), in between making repeated, tensely phrased phone calls to her husband in London.

Hogg does not deny her own upper-middle-class upbringing — she was raised in a village near Tunbridge Wells — and claims the film began as autobiographical. One of the most common comments on the film is how little apology it makes for the easy affluence of its characters.

It is clear that Hogg still finds being interviewed a slightly daunting novelty. She is reluctant to give any details on her personal life aside from the fact that she lives in west London and is emphatically not married. Although she doesn't deny that the character of Anna is clearly based on her, she is more comfortable talking about the film-making process.

She doesn't pretend the 30-year build-up was all part of some great plan: it was just that life — and other blossoming careers — kept getting in the way.

Back in the early Eighties when she first arrived there, Soho was in the process of transforming itself from a seedy village into the crucible of the British cinema renaissance and the emerging music-video business.

"I'd always had my eye on London and knew I would end up here," says Hogg, now quite at home in one of those clubs for media folk that have replaced Eighties haunts such as the Pollo restaurant and Patisserie Valerie.

Hogg began as assistant to an advertising photographer — a job that involved taking pictures of products, plus the occasional person. "But the exciting thing for me," she says, "is that he let me use his studio and his large-format camera at weekends. I was running about delivering film during the week, then doing my own thing at weekends. Crossing over with this was my increasing interest in film."

Which is where Derek Jarman, artistic godfather of Eighties Soho film-making, comes into the picture. Hogg met Jarman in Valerie's. "I'd been asked by an artist doing kinetic sculpture to make a film of his work," she recalls. "I knew nothing about it so I was trying to find a way of doing this without having any equipment or any idea how to make a film. Derek lent me his Super-8 camera. And the film I made ended up being my entry into the National Film School."

A four-year stint in Beaconsfield and a "very Ken Loachian" project to make a documentary in Sunderland culminated, rather incongruously, in a successful career in music videos, working with Steve Barron's Limelight company, one of the cutting-edge outfits of that golden age of the three-minute music clip. Hogg worked with diverse bands: Alison Moyet, Johnny Thunders and various others, finding stories to go with songs. "Some," she admits, "went better than others."

It has been said of music videos — and especially of Barron's, which were narrative-driven — that they were three-minute dramas set to music. But Hogg's interest was in more traditional forms of drama, which eventually took her to five years of soaps. "I was quite determined," she says, "and I knew that if I wanted more experience directing drama, I had to learn it in television."

She turned out to be very good at it, doing Casualty and the landmark EastEnders special, Dot's Story, which went out over the New Year in 2003. Hogg is defensive about those years — "I don't want to be dismissive because I recognise that I learnt an awful lot," she says. But she seems to have found in the production-line process of TV serial drama the same freedom that directors of genre fare found in Hollywood: as long as you delivered the goods and got the story across, you had a relatively free hand. "You could do a whole episode in one shot," she says, "and I did actually do one episode like that. I wasn't expecting it when I went in but, within the limitations, you could really push the envelope."

What happened next — between 2003, when she left TV, and 2006, when she finished writing Unrelated — is something Hogg is reluctant to talk about. She calls it "a sabbatical" but admits to dealing with issues in her own life which seem quite close to those faced by Anna in Unrelated. "It coincided with what became the germ of the idea for Unrelated in my personal life," admits Hogg. "My father died in 2003 and I was also thinking about starting a family, so time was taken up with personal things that led up to Unrelated. But really I just disappeared into personal stuff and wasn't working."

In Unrelated, Anna finds it difficult to relate to Verena, the old friend she goes to stay with in Tuscany, and ends up spending time with Verena's teenage son, Oakley (Hiddleston), and his friends. But when messages get mixed, it is the boy who gently closes the door.

The idyll is finally destroyed by an incident involving a minor car crash where Anna's adult self cannot help siding with the grown-ups and, as a result, alienating Oakley. The relationship between the 40-year-old woman and the teenage boy is exquisitely wrought — casual but with a strong erotic undercurrent — but the effect it has on Anna is traumatic. Whether it is also cathartic is, says Hogg, something that lies outside the film.

"I think ultimately it is positive for her, and I think she probably does go back to her relationship in London. I'm not saying she definitely does. But I'm an optimist and there is hope."

Unrelated was made on a small budget, assembled by producer Barbara Stone, founder of Notting Hill's Gate Cinema. Hogg claims the limited means offered a kind of freedom. "You could stop shooting for a day if you needed to, which you can never do if you've got completion bond people breathing down your neck," she says. Shot in 2006, Unrelated was completed in 2007. Stone invited Geoff Andrew, programmer at the National Film Theatre, to a screening, and it was he who recommended the LFF team take a look.

What impressed him, says Andrew, is that "the film felt very unlike most British films, because it took its time to divulge information about the characters and their feelings and motivations. That kind of mature, assured, unflashy but very humane film-making is pretty rare in Britain these days."

Hogg, meanwhile, is well into her next script. "Similar territory," she says. "Not Italy — a different country — but similar family territory and characters, similar age "
So will it also be just a little bit autobiographical? Hogg sighs, then, to my surprise, opens the door a little wider.

"I don't see it as autobiographical," she says. "It's just that I write about whatever is preoccupying me at the time. It's about coming to terms with not having children. I've realised that making films is another way of having a family. I'm quite obsessive about what I do and I'm very much a one-project-at-a-time person. So, if I did have children, I don't think I'd be making films."

Unrelated is in cinemas now.