LONDON — Handbags can be big and slouchy, wide and roomy. Who knew they could also be so deep?
In her short film for Miu Miu Women’s Tales, the British director Joanna Hogg looks at life from a handbag’s perspective, specifically the Wander matelassé leather shoulder bag.
In just over 20 minutes, the bag is born, experiences moments of joy, fear, loss and abandonment, and then meditates on death and eternity.
The opening and final scenes are heartbreaking as the white hobo bag sits — aged, battered and slightly misshapen — on a rock in the Tuscan countryside, staring at the gray sky.
Adding even more poignancy to the project is the voice of the narrator, an Italian woman in her 80s who had never acted before, and who expresses the bag’s thoughts with a blend of naivety, passion and sadness.
Joanna Hogg filming “Autobiografia di una Borsetta,” number 29 in the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series.
The film, “Autobiografia di una Borsetta,” is in Italian with English subtitles, and takes place in the Maremma, in southern Tuscany. It’s number 29 in the Miu Miu series, which Miuccia Prada launched in 2011.
Cinema has long been a Prada passion and the series allows women directors to speak up and offer different points of view. Prada has described the series as “a conversation with women about women,” and it is one of the only consistent, commissioning platforms exclusively for female filmmakers.
Like all of the directors in the series, Hogg had permission — and a set budget — to make a film about whatever she wanted.
“The incredible thing is there is no brief, which is very rare thing in this world of filmmaking. But that’s intimidating, too, and it took me a while to land on this story,” she said over a cup of tea at The Mayfair Townhouse hotel earlier this week.
The Miu Miu Wander bag living a life of luxury in the Tuscan countryside before things go horribly wrong.
Hogg said she saw the film as an “interesting vehicle to express my ideas about the end of life and the fears we all have. The bag became this vessel for feelings that I maybe wouldn’t be so free to express if it was an actual human character.”
While Hogg may have been working with a luxury product — the smallest Wander bag costs 2,000 pounds — she didn’t sugarcoat the narrative, or treat the bag as a precious object.
While it may have been born in the sleek Prada factory and later gifted to a pampered teenager, the bag does not have an easy life. At various points, it’s stolen and used to hide a gun and wads of dirty cash. Later in the film it’s dumped in a cardboard evidence box at the local police station.
In one scene, it feels sad and tries to comfort one of its owners who’s having problems with her boyfriend. In another, it rejoices when it’s rescued by a group of young campers, who forget to take it with them when they move on. “They were not aware of my worth,” says the bag with resignation.
The Miu Miu Wander bag desperately tries to comfort its downcast owner in a scene from Joanna Hogg’s film for Miu Miu Women’s Tales series.
“I wanted to really feel the breadth of the life in the film, even if the life of a handbag is a matter of years,” said Hogg, adding that it was a challenge to create the character of the handbag.
“I didn’t want to over-humanize it, like in a cartoon, but I did want to express its reality. It’s a bag. It can’t do anything, can’t change its own life. It’s not in control,” Hogg said.
Hogg’s is the first film in the Tales series to make an inanimate object the star.
Hogg used four iPhones 16s to shoot, and a variety of sizes of Wander. Her priority was to film life from the bag’s perspective, which means that many of the shots are at knee level, shoulder level or through the handle of the bag.
The director said she chose the Wander for its “character,” and only later discovered that it’s one of Miu Miu’s most popular styles. She chose white because it easily reflects other colors, and surrounding objects.
“I didn’t want anything too angular and I liked the Wander because it’s almost wrinkled. There was something alive about it,” she said.
Joanna Hogg filming in Tuscany. She used used four iPhones 16s to shoot the film from the Miu Miu bag’s perspective.
Hogg worked with a local, non-actor cast, and dressed many of them in Miu Miu.
The young, female assassins in one scene are wearing miniskirts and dashing around in clacket-y colored heels, looking unusually stylish. The sad girlfriend who lives in a cramped, urban apartment still wears a fabulous white coat, and black slingbacks, courtesy of the Italian brand.
The short will premiere Thursday evening at London’s Curzon Mayfair cinema, and be available afterward on Miu Miu’s digital channels. Like the other films in the Tales series, it will be available to stream on Mubi globally from Feb. 23.
Hogg is an award-winning feature filmmaker whose works include “Unrelated” (2008), “Archipelago” (2010), “Exhibition” (2013) and “The Souvenir” (2019), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Award.
She also directed “The Souvenir Part II” (2021) and “The Eternal Daughter” (2022), which starred Tilda Swinton. The film was executive produced by Martin Scorsese, and premiered in competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival that year.
Joanna Hogg
Hogg said the short made her think differently about the characters in her films.
“There was something about expressing my feelings through something else. There was a feeling of liberation [in speaking through the bag]. But [going forward] the bag could equally be a character, someone who is nothing like me. I’m always wanting to push into new territory, and the film increased my appetite to try new things,” she said.
Hogg is also looking at handbags in a new way. Like many creative professionals on the move, she’s laden with a slim but weighty laptop, notebooks and the general stuff of life, which prevents her from carrying something as shapely and cute as the Wander.
“I would make a plea to Miu Miu to make larger bags,” she said. “The bags that can carry computers are often in boring colors. We haven’t really moved on from the idea of the male briefcase.”
She said people want to carry “something that’s interesting, not just a vessel for your things.”
Miu Miu may have given birth to the film series, but maybe the time has come for the films — and their directors — to inspire some new Miu Miu styles.
