Film “Last Night in Soho” in the cinema: Sleep well! – Culture

Oh, London, says the taxi driver. “London can be a bit too much at times”. Then he grins at his young passenger in the rearview mirror and scans her with a lustful look, which in an ideal world should fall under sexual law.

At the beginning of the movie “Last Night in Soho”, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) comes from the country to the big city to study fashion design at the art college – her big dream. But London is different from what she imagined in her dreams. That is of course a bit due to people like the disgusting taxi driver or their scheming roommate in the dormitory, who the devil must have come up with on a particularly happy day. But it is mainly due to a condition that every sympathetic person ultimately despairs of every day: the present.

Eloise is a fanatical fan of the swinging sixties. Whenever she feels unobserved, she makes sixties clothes out of newspaper and poses with a cigarette holder under an Audrey Hepburn poster while Peter & Gordon or Rotate Dusty Springfield on the turntable. With this seductively smoky dream world of a past that she has never experienced herself, the disdainful, cold present cannot keep up. But then something magical happens.

An old James Bond poster is the first clue to the heroine that there is no happy ending waiting for her here

Eloise flees the dormitory from her roommate and finds refuge as a lodger with an old lady. Their house looks like it was preserved for eternity in the sixties and has never been renovated since. When Eloise lay down in the creaking bed in the evening and fell asleep, she suddenly woke up in the wild Soho of the 1960s, where the glittering neon signs of the West End glow as beautifully as one can hardly imagine. In the most elegant nightclub in town, the Café de Paris, she sees in the mirror a young woman who could be a casual dream version of herself, with platinum blonde hair and daring hips. The woman (Anya Taylor-Joy) seems to be a kind of Jekyll & Hyde image of her, in the glamor version. Sometimes she looks at Eloise in the mirror as if she were herself; sometimes Eloise can watch her like someone sitting next to her.

With her and next to her, she grabs the most daring gentleman in the nightclub and flies with him across the dance floor as if she had done nothing else in her life. What a dream! Or wasn’t it a dream at all? The hickey that the gentleman gives her dream avatar at a forbidden late hour also adorns Eloise’s neck when she wakes up …

British director Edgar Wright is himself an avid fan of golden London in the 1960s. He even wrote a character for “Last Night in Soho” in order to be able to offer his favorite idol of that decade a guest role: The sixties icon Diana Rigg, who became famous in the cult series “With umbrella, charm and bowler hat” and “Im Her Majesty’s Secret Service “was the most tragic Bond girl in 007 history, he plays the mysterious old landlady with whom his main character Eloise is staying.

Rigg died shortly after filming, and Wright got her in Guardian a wonderful little goodbye written. It was she who got him in the right mood for his sixties project because she not only witnessed the magic of that time, but still embodied it. At their first meeting in the legendary Berners Tavern, she immediately greeted him appropriately: “I’ll have a Campari soda, darling – do you have one too?”

Edgar Wright is a passionate genre mixer. Among other things, he shot the horror comedy “Shaun of the Dead” and the gangster musical “Baby Driver”. “Last Night in Soho” is not just an elegant nostalgia trip, but a horror thriller about the shallows of dreams that we dream at night and that can change from wishful to nightmare in a matter of seconds.

That the escape from bed in the sixties meant no happy ending for the heroine is shown early on by the many small allusions to the horror film history that Wright builds into the film like gloomy omens, from “Suspiria” to “When the gondolas bear mourning” to to Roman Polanski’s “Disgust”.

In the back rooms of the Café de Paris, the glamor of the sixties quickly crumbles

The gigantic poster that shines over the old cinema palace when Eloise sets off on her first night out on her sixties excursion advertises the film “Fireball”. The poster for the fourth James Bond film starring Sean Connery not only reveals the year in which these dream constructions could be set – 1965 – but is also a small indication that this dream of Swinging London also harbors a nightmare. On the “fireball” poster, a couple of submissive bikini girls are lounging at the secret agent’s feet. On her next dream excursions, Eloise learns that the sixties, in addition to their glorified glamor, also have a very submissively defined role model ready for a young woman, which is subordinate to the will of men.

In the back rooms of the Café de Paris, where glamor is breaking, your dream doppelganger gets caught up in a vortex of abuse and misogyny. And at her side Eloise witnesses a murderer who begins to pursue her in the present even when she is awake.

Wright and his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns (incidentally one of the best screenwriters of the younger generation, who has already been nominated for an Oscar for their script for “1917”), should have once again browsed the Sigmund Freud Complete Edition for their film. Your “Last Night in Soho” is definitely the most exciting dream interpretation of this cinema year.

Last night in Soho, GB 2021 – Director: Edgar Wright. Book: Krysty Wilson-Cairns, Edgar Wright. Camera: Chung-hoon Chung. Starring: Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith. Universal, 116 minutes. Theatrical release: November 11, 2021.