If D loves H, then where does this prickliness — this obstinacy verging on imperviousness — come from? Watching her swing between secluding herself from H — physically, verbally — and clinging to him, I think of the painter Celia Paul, who became Lucien Freud’s lover in 1978 after meeting him at the Slade School of Art, when he was 55 and her teacher and she an 18-year-old student, and who has described young women in such circumstances as facing a “dilemma.” These women have “their own ambition for their art, and their need to be loved and desired. The two ambitions are usually incompatible.” This incompatibility has many causes, among them the duty that arises out of love, which, Paul testifies, makes it difficult to remain “dedicated to my art in an undivided way. I think that generally men find it much easier to be selfish. And you do need to be selfish.” I think of Alice Munro, who admitted to interviewers dispatched by the Paris Review that, while all young artists needed to be somewhat “hard hearted,” “it’s worse if you’re a woman. . . . When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other.”

though this might make them sound virtuous but stolid, like dutiful commentaries on a certain kind of stereo-typically English reserve. In fact, despite their pace, they are not stolid

[...] Watching her alternate between naked woundedness and vehemence, I was reminded of Louise Glück’s description of the aspiring poet’s debased yearning — her “adamant need which makes it possible to endure every form of failure.” The harshness of that failure is as little veiled by Julie’s face as a flush.

In the Julie Harte movies, the methods Hogg uses to make sense of her mother’s life are first exercised in the film-within-a-film in Part II, where Julie materializes in a hall of mirrors, by a misty river, and has to walk, like Carroll’s Alice, through an undersized door. The film is dreamily disjointed and obvious, filled with symbols of romantic intimidation, of the end of adolescence, of ambition. It has a kinship with the terrible brightness and emphatic, externalized rendering of the ballerina’s inner journey in The Red Shoes. The allusion reaches back both to Anthony telling Julie, in the first film, that he likes Powell and Pressburger (“I think they’re very truthful,” he says, “without necessarily being real”), and to the urgent journey of that film’s protagonist, an aspiring ballerina who is told by her impressive but dour mentor, “You cannot have it both ways. The dancer who relies on the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer.”