17 Nov 2021

Review- Last Night in Soho

From At The Movies, 7:30 pm on 17 November 2021

Last Night in Soho starts deceptively simply, like many of director Edgar Wright’s films.   Eloise is packing in her bedroom at her Granny’s house in Cornwall. 

Posters, pinups, old album covers, and in pride of place, a picture of Audrey Hepburn in her Breakfast at Tiffany’s phase.

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Photo: Screenshot

Eloise has much of Audrey’s elfin appeal, but does she have the same grit underneath? She’ll need it as she heads off to Big Bad London and the fashion business.

She moves into a bedsit, run by Diana Rigg, in her final role before her death last year.

Rigg is not the only Sixties presence in the cast. There are featured roles for Rita Tushingham, Terence Stamp and original Bond girl, Goldfinger’s Margaret Nolan.  

Eloise – she prefers Ellie – has already established her obsession with the city and the era in her fashion choices. 

But things take a turn for the strange when that night she has a more than usually vivid dream -  a dream of stardom in 1966.

Her Sixties surrogate is Sandie, who lands in Soho clubland with a ruthless determination  to make it as a singer.

Sandie is played by The Queen’s Gambit’s Anya Taylor-Joy - a far more glamorous Sixties type than Ellie. Marianne Faithful, maybe, or even Brigitte Bardot.

The way director Edgar Wright works his two leads is dazzling. Many of the effects are practical, in-camera tricks, using mirrors – real and fake - doubles and brilliant choreography.

In a digital world, nothing succeeds like real, movie magic.

Ellie wakes up and can’t shake her dream off.  Particularly when she picks up the action the following night.  It’s undeniably exciting at first – parties, night clubs and always the promise of fame and fortune.

And if Sandie runs into some pretty sleazy types along the way, well, this is her time, not theirs 

But of course that’s not true.  Yes, the Sixties were huge fun – the music, the fashion, the beautiful people and the famous sexual revolution. But it was also completely run by men, and older men at that.

Very few of the so-called stars were in charge of their own lives, least of all the women.

And Ellie’s dreams start turning into nightmares.  She starts to wonder if Sandie could have been a real person.  Who was she, and who was her dangerous friend Jack – Matt Smith as a very Sixties hustler?

If it’s a dream, whose dream exactly?

Last Night in Soho is a brilliant recreation of a very specific era – all the more impressive for the production being closed down for weeks last year. The closing credits roll over shots of Soho, eerily deserted during lockdown.

Like most Edgar Wright films, it’s occasionally too clever by half – though Sixties directors like Dick Lester and Roman Polanski would no doubt heartily approve of that!

Slightly more puzzling is why the publicity for the film has tended to overlook actual star Thomasin McKenzie – it is Eloise’s story, she’s in just about every scene – in favour of the undeniably glamorous Anya Taylor-Joy. 

So which one will the public take to its bosom?  I’m reminded of Sixties hit movie Georgy Girl.  Good girl Lynn Redgrave got the boy at the end, but it was bad girl Charlotte Rampling who walked off with the stellar career.

Will Anya Taylor-Joy pull off the same trick?  It all comes down to what happens next, I suppose.

Thomasin’s finishing an English TV series based on a clever Kate Atkinson novel, while Anya’s next is a star-studded movie with Robert De Niro and Margot Robbie. Let’s see who “lets their life go”, I suppose.

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