British director Edgar Wright showed he knew how to put the fun back into schlock with his 2004 runaway zombie hit Shaun of the Dead and the subsequent installments in his Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy. His much-awaited Last Night in Soho is a bit more complex and certainly no comedy, but it also delivers a large amount of pure audience enjoyment, with no deep meanings attached. Starring a dynamic duo of young actresses who are a study in contrasts – a soap and water Thomasin McKenzie and the provocative Anya Taylor-Joy – and spiced with appearances by British Sixties’ icons Diana Rigg, Rita Tushingham and Terence Stamp, it should be a hot release around the globe this fall, following its premiere in Venice out of competition.
New Zealand actress McKenzie (Leave No Trace, Jojo Rabbit) plays Eloise as a wide-eyed country girl from Cornwall who comes to London to study fashion design. She has a lot of spunk and is determined to succeed where her mother failed. In London, after fleeing from a dorm out of hell (Synnove Karsen is a hoot as her catty, impossible roommate), she finds new digs in Soho more consonant with the way she imagines life in London should be. She also finds a glamorous mirror for her fantasies in Taylor-Joy’s sensuous Sandie, an aspiring night club singer. The thing is, Eloise is living today, while Sandie lives in the 1960’s. It’s complicated.
The story, written by Wright with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, hinges on Eloise’s psychic ability to see her dead mother, a mentally ill woman who killed herself when the girl was 7. When she settles into an attic room she rents from a nice old landlady, she feels she’s achieved freedom. But she also starts seeing visions of Soho in the Sixties, her favorite period in history. As she plays her granny’s old records (for fans of the period, Stephen Price’s soundtrack is nothing short of sublime, one golden oldie after another), she suddenly sees Sandie making her bold entrance in the Café de Paris dressed in a pleated pink chiffon dress with piles of bouffant blonde hair. She is totally self-confident, witty, irresistible. And she knows how to talk to men — men like the handsome Jack (Matt Smith), who becomes her manager. In her dreams at night, Eloise observes Sandie’s sophistication and success and takes heart. Her talent starts to blaze at the fashion institute. She’s even inspired to color her hair blonde and cut it in an eye-catching retro style that recalls Sandie’s.
And yet, there’s something disturbing about the striking face of Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit) that hints at a dark side, a quality of the actress recognized and exploited in films like Robert Eggers’ period horror film The Witch and M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Split. Here Wright makes Sandie the victim of a very real, mundane horror that turns the second half of the film away from carefree daydream to a nightmare she and her watcher Eloise can’t escape.
The final scenes are, naturally, over the top but a little underwhelming in the fantasy department, barring the delight of an unforeseen revelation that solves the mystery of what became of Sandie. One rather wishes Eloise could have screamed less and showed more chutzpah in facing scary things – or did female power only kick in after the mid-Sixties? In any case, she has a knight championing her in a sensitive fellow student (Michael Ajao) whose attraction to this eccentric miss seems genuine enough; at least, he withstands the slings and arrows of being caught by the landlady with his pants down while Eloise, out of her head with her visions, screams bloody murder – a most compromising position for a poor boy from south London.
Even if the nostalgic mirror is thoroughly broken by the end of the film when the dark side of the past takes over, the most enjoyable part of film for most viewers will still be Wright’s cleverly turning back the clock so we can time-travel through those magical years filled with sex, glamour, some of the best pop music ever written, and unforgettable style. D.P. Chung Chung-hoo has a ball lighting the colorful pop colors of Marcus Rowland’s period production design. (A must-mention: a heart-stopping movie marquee featuring Sean Connery in Thunderball.) And hats off to Odile Dicks-Mireaux for reviving the pink dresses and vinyl boots and white raincoats that dreams are made of.
Director: Edgar Wright
Screenplay: Edgar Wright, Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Thomasin McKenzie, Matt Smith, Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg, Rita Tushingham, Michael Ajao, Synnove Karlsen
Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Nira Park, Edgar Wright
Cinematography: Chung Chung-hoo
Production design: Marcus Rowland
Costume design: Odile Dicks-Mireaux
Editing: Paul Machliss
Music, sound: Stephen Price
Production companies: Complete Fiction (UK), Working Title Films (UK)
World sales: Universal Pictures
Venue: Venice Film Festival (out of competition)
In English
118 minutes
