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Last Night in Soho
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| Year: |
2021
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Director: |
Edgar Wright
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| Stars: |
Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Diana Rigg, Rita Tushingham, Michael Ajao, Synnove Karlsen, Terence Stamp, Pauline McLynn, Elizabeth Berrington, Jessie Mei Li, Kassius Nelson, Rebecca Harrod, Michael Jibson, Lisa McGrillis
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| Genre: |
Horror, Drama |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) lost her mother when she was seven years old, so has lived with her grandmother (Rita Tushingham) since childhood, but after receiving her acceptance into London's School of Fashion, she feels it is now time to spread her wings. However, Gran's influence may go further than Eloise admits: she loves the music and the culture of the nineteen-sixties, when Gran was in her heyday, and does not connect so much with the modern world. She's not a nostalgist as such, because she was never around in the sixties, but she does long for a mythical past, and as she moves to the Big Smoke, it may be her undoing...
Director Edgar Wright is somewhat in the same boat, of course, as he is always keen to wax lyrical about the movies he grew up with, and the efforts from before he was born that he discovered in the film buff's familiar impulse to keep watching as many of them as possible: as Martin Scorsese said, film is like heroin, and the only cure is more film. Or was it Frank Capra who said that? You see how you can be tied in knots with the cinema, since there's always something else to know, or experience, and that was more or less the manner in which the mystery at the heart of Last Night in Soho played out, at over-indulgent length of nearly two hours.
There was no doubting Wright's skill with the camera, or his soundtrack, but here he was tackling a grand theme, and all the pretty pictures and catchy vintage music were in danger of glossing over what turned into a cross between Roman Polanski's Repulsion and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Sexists as Eloise's retreat into a potentially real dreamland transforms into a nightmare. What happens is that she rocks up at her halls of residence only to be royally put off her contemporaries by her roommate (Synnove Karlsen) who is the sort of person who takes the news Ellie's mother passed away as a challenge to gain more sympathy from the others in their year.
Therefore Eloise - rechristening herself Ellie - moves into a bedsit in Soho to better clear her head, but the trouble with this girl is that she not only rhapsodises about the past, she can transport herself there, we never find out how, just have to accept it. She gets an alter ego, Sandie (Anya Taylor Joy), who is more evidence the film's pleasures are on the surface; Sandie wants to be in showbiz, so hooks up with a manager, Jack (Matt Smith), who is to nobody's surprise a wide boy who sets about exploiting her. Starting with putting her in the chorus of a girly show in Soho, as we see Ellie's illusions begin to splinter and eventually shatter, though Wright had the pressing matter of misogyny on his mind, and explored it through contrasting eras.
Some complained about this, saying it was not Wright's point of view as a middle-aged man that we needed to hear, which totally ignored the fact he had brought in Krysty Wilson-Cairns to co-write the screenplay, so he certainly had a point about sexism not having gone away, as did his fellow scribe, even from those who thought they were right on. However, subtlety was not on the cards, and the only female survivor of the sixties showbiz system we see is Cilla Black, briefly in a nightclub sequence, though in grappling with the subject it never quite got to grips with, it did make the interesting observation that even the most innocent of men can come across as a threat without meaning to. This cause and effect we see when nice guy and fellow student Jon (Michael Ajao) notes Ellie is having a tough time, and tries to reach out.
But even we're not sure of the nobility of his motives, such is the paranoia the film exerts over its jittery heroine. Tying in with that, there was a sub-theme about the shame of mental illness, here caused by the various prejudices, and that was rather shaky too, but as a feast for the eyes, Wright was onto a winner, and probably should have concocted a plot that took place exclusively in the sixties, as timid rodent Ellie had so little agency, mostly buffeted around by her afflictions and the bad influences encroaching on her mind. But faces from that era were well-cast, Terence Stamp as the mystery man who may know what's going on, Diana Rigg as the landlady, and even Margaret Nolan showing up for a one-shot cameo. It may be churlish to complain the ending didn't make sense, even for a giallo tribute, but it did have the feel of a project that needed tightening up. Music by Steven Price, deftly mixing in with Wright's record collection.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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