Director Edgar Wright’s new film is an exhilarating, boldly audacious slice of cinematic razzle-dazzle: a breathtaking experience with a true sense of wonder.
Last Night in Soho barely achieved theatrical release late last year, which is a shame; it screams to be seen on the big screen.
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| Sandie (Anna Taylor-Joy, left), resigned to the direction her life has taken, prepares for another evening at the club, while Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) watches from the other side of a mirror. |
Wright also is known for making savvy use of music, and at first blush his new film seems a sweet love letter to 1960s pop tunes. A lengthy prologue introduces Eloise “Ellie” Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), a sweet but unsophisticated young woman who lives with her grandmother Peggy (Rita Tushingham) in rural Redruth, Cornwall. Ellie adores the music and fashion of the Swinging Sixties; the title credits appear against Peter & Gordon’s “A World Without Love,” as she capers about her bedroom in a handmade newspaper dress.
Wright augments this nostalgic atmosphere by casting 1960s icons — Tushingham, Diana Rigg and Terence Stamp — as supporting characters. (Sharp-eyed viewers also might recognize Margaret Nolan, who memorably played the voluptuous Dink in Goldfinger, and who pops up here as a wise barmaid.)
Ellie has long dreamed of studying at the London College of Fashion, and her eyes go sparkling wide upon receiving an acceptance letter. Peggy is concerned; she knows that Ellie’s mother — also a fashion designer — killed herself for reasons unspecified, and that the impressionable Ellie has a tendency to occasionally “see” her mother, like a watchfully lingering spirit.
Peggy’s apprehension is justified, because nothing could have prepared Ellie for the cacophonous hustle and bustle of her late-night arrival in London, against the deafening opening bars of John Barry’s jazz/rock title theme to 1960’s Beat Girl. Her rowdy college dorm is even worse, when she’s immediately targeted by a posse of “mean girls” — led by her new roommate, Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen, impressively bitchy) — who feign friendship just long enough to more accurately mock Ellie’s country-mouse innocence.
Knowing that she’d never survive in this unrestrained atmosphere of alcohol, drugs and casual sex, Ellie flees to a charming upstairs room in a bedsit run by the elderly Ms. Collins (Rigg, in her final role). Naturally, this abode is located on Goodge Street, popularized in a 1965 song by Donovan (which, I was surprised to discover, is not included in this film’s retro soundtrack).
That night, Ellie wakens into a participatory dream; she wanders down a shadowy corridor until — just as Cilla Black’s “You’re My World” hits its crescendo — she stumbles into 1960s Soho. The transition is breathtaking; Wright, production designer Marcus Rowland and costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux fill this streetscape with sparkling vintage vehicles, nattily attired men, gorgeously dressed women, and all manner of period-specific décor.
Sean Connery presides over everything from a massive marquee poster for Thunderball, atop a handsome movie theater.
The authenticity notwithstanding, the result is an opulently stylized, somewhat larger-than-life London: much the way Quentin Tarantino re-imaged Los Angeles, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; and Jean-Pierre Jeunet gave us an impossibly perfect Paris, in Amélie.
