Review: LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

Ellie is dancing to Peter and Gordon in a puffy paper dress of her own design when her nan calls her downstairs. The post has just come. She's got into fashion school in London. London looks and feels just as she imagined, lights, life and colour (and creepy cabbies) but when she gets to the dorm it's all bitchface girls thankful for a non volunteer leper. So, she gets a job and moves into a bedsit and all is well. Well, she starts having dreams that she is back in her beloved sixties, strolling in a hoodie through streets of Aston Martins, dolly birds and black tie clubs. 

At one of the latter something strange happens. The attendant takes her hoodie, referring to it as a cloak and she's in. But when she looks in the mirror a blonde stunner in the haute couture is staring back. When that girl, introducing herself as Sandy to one of the megasleazy tuxedo oldies in the club, moves about her mission to start her shobiz career at the top, we see Ellie in mirrors. When Sandy starts getting too deep into Soho's Babylonian underworld things get darker and nastier as Ellie first observes but increasingly gets involved.

That's much more plot than I usually give but the setup is fairly complicated at first so the rest can flow with ease. Writer/director Edgar Wright speaks of the1960s as the decade he just missed out on and invests a lot of this longing for a former era into Ellie. So, whether it's on an old portable record player in the bedroom or bluetooth headphones in the train we get a wall to wall '60s jukebox. No complaints from me, there. But the other nostalgia on show here is for the tough thrillers like Repulsion and Don't Look Now (which Wright himself cites as influences) but the whole raft of Italian Giallo thrillers with its hallucinatory dreamscapes, lysergic colour, violence with blades rather than bullets, and transported Hitchcockian paranoia.

That nostalgia is going to keep returning to centre screen the way real nostalgia does to each of us, but not just in design or sourced music but in the characters themselves. Ellie missed the '60s by about four decades and to her it is a vision whose life is one of unattainable longing. When she enters Sandy's world the logic of what Sandy is trying to do bumps up grossly against her own vision. She doesn't get to go on stage after Cilla Black in the first '60s scene but she does get to audition at a lesser club. Her sultry rendition of Downtown (Anya Taylor Joy's own unaccompanied rendition, and it's sensational) is squashed into a caryard cube when we see the part she really gets. 

In a striking scene a performer costumed as a marionette mimes Sandy Shaw's Puppet on a String in an outfit so oldie it's gold. Around her, a line of dancers with chairs perform robotic burlesque moves, gyrations, leg spreads, with doll-like expressionless faces. They are clapped on by a group of men done to the nines for a night on the town, all blue suits (you can almost smell the cocktail of cologne and sweat). Sandy is not even the lead mime, she's one of the dancers, looking, as they do, like she's coping with shock. This scene is pure Kubrick. It's not a copy of any of his scenes, mind you (although you could think of it as a reversal of the end of Paths of Glory) it's just that the collision of Sandy's ambition and what her world prefers her to be have a visibly brutalising effect. The detail and icy precision of it hammer that in. This is a bridge between Swinging London and the Soho of the Krays and holding on to nostalgia is going to feel druggy in the ugly sense, loss of control and amped-up threat.

While these themes are given rich time on screen by Wright 'n' the gang he curiously falls short in the thriller department. Halfway through the middle act there is a drag as the action that tightens the bonds between now and then, Ellie and Sandy starts to get repetitious. The film starts to feel long rather than deep. I wish the trope of the ghostly figures (not that much of a spoiler) had more eeriness to it. A case of less is more on that one.

But I wonder if I'm on the wrong track there. Part of what is going on here is another mix of old and new that reinforces all the themes around it: the casting. Thomasin MacKenzie as Ellie and Anya Taylor Joy as Sandy give plenty of evidence that the art of screen acting is far from lost, both delivering well crafted physical and vocal performances throughout as they have to compliment each other as characters but also remain distinct (and Wright really does push the physical resemblance hard). Terrence Stamp as a tough old Cockney is a natural. He gives only as much as he needs to keep us guessing his identity in the '60s world. 

But it is Diana Rigg who really shines. She was required viewing in the '60s as half of the team in The Avengers, the groovy spy-fi X-Files precursor. Her character name in that was Emma Peel and it was a construction: m(an) appeal. If anyone knew what both being in control of their career involved and the strength needed to keep herself out of the downward pull of the culture felt like it was she. It's a strong performance that contains the poignancy, pathos and comedy she was always so strongly capable of. If that started sounding like a eulogy then it should. This film was her swansong, she died last year (not of Covid).

So, while more middle-heavy than it should be Last Night in Soho leaves a good impression. A fable about the dangers of nostalgia (especially when it isn't your own) folded into a trippy urban thriller, it is one of the better fates that await the unwary ticket buyer now that cinemas are open again. Bring a little patience to the screen and it will do pretty well by you. The lush to gaudy pallet will dazzle, the music will spark interest in one of pop's greatest decades, you get two of the most promising young talents in cinema to watch and also get to say farewell to Diana Rigg in style. Good value right there.