One dreams of Swinging London in the 1960s, the other has lived there. They will meet in Last Night in Soho by Edgar Wright. Thomasin McKenzie, seen in Leave No Trace and Jojo- Rabbit and Anya Taylor-Joy, revelation of the series The Lady’s Game, deliver an impressive mirroring performance in this horrific tale.
The first, an apprentice stylist bottle-fed with sixties tubes, finds herself immersed at this time as soon as she falls asleep. And here she is, sharing the experience of a young dancer, but her journey through time quickly turns into a nightmare. “The film confronts the fantasized image that we can have of an era with reality,” explains Edgard Wright to 20 minutes. It’s a story of women. To tell it, the director of
Baby Driver and Sparks Brothers has collected female testimonies.
A progressive nightmare
His producers and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Stairns supported him as did his young actresses. He also secured the collaboration of stars who lived through this era such as Diana Riggs (who died in 2020 and to whom Last Night in Soho is dedicated) and
Rita Tushingham. “It was essential to be as exact as possible not only in the reconstruction of the 1960s but also in describing the experiences undergone by the heroines,” he says. Between the brutal pimp of the sixties (Matt Smith, disturbing) and the creepy bar pillar of today (Terence Stamp, terrifying), the two young women have something to feel threatened all the time.
“I had in mind the aesthetics of films from this period with their warm colors,” says Edgar Wright. I hijacked her to make her scary, so that each foray of the heroine in these years was more and more anxiety-provoking. And it works could not be better as we let ourselves be caught up with it in a hostile world that the beauty of the images makes even more deadly. We think of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, masters of Italian horror, discovering a London with baroque hues.
Heroines in distress
One of the most beautiful scenes of the film, during which the young ladies meet in a staircase covered with mirrors, testifies to the virtuosity of the filmmaker. “I designed my staging like a ballet on songs from the 1960s,” he insists. There are very few digital special effects. Most of the footage was shot live. This reinforces the immersion of a spectator who, without really realizing it, feels in his flesh the distress of young women whom he discovers less fragile than he had imagined.