For alienated adolescents and plenty of awkward adults, disaffected and unsatisfied with modern life, the past has provided a perpetually alluring form of escapism. As much as we’d like to think that we, the mod-dressed moderns, invented this kind of backward-looking appropriation and cultural fanboyism, the truth is that humans have done this for centuries — one need only look at Renaissance Europe, which looked at the Romans and the Greeks as a kind of forgotten heyday unable to be recaptured in Borgia Italy or something — but it has gotten easier with the advents of photography, high-quality sound recording and, of course, cinema. It’s easy — and has never been easier — to retreat into comforting glamor and manner that’s been preserved in a kind of dishonest amber like a beautiful butterfly trapped in sap that contains a deadly and unknown virus should it be tampered with by the too-curious. And if it is messed with, dropped on a laboratory floor by clumsy and over-eager hands, sometimes that virus is able to escape into the world and wreck havoc upon the unsuspecting. Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, a fascinating and gorgeous, if slightly messy, giallo tribute steeped in the culture of the fashionable London nightlife of the mid-’60s, is a tale of such an accident, where the cruel realities of the distant past begin to creep into modern life and totally disrupt the present. It’s unlike anything Wright’s done previously, given that its style is so far away from the kind that made him enduring and famous, and that its perspective — which, in his prior works, has tended to be solely positive in its homage — is cut with kerosene.
Like most modern giallo homages — or at least ones released in the past year — Soho concerns itself with the stuff of dreams and nightmares, whose lush and lovely imagery sours and taints the mind of Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie, who is slowly building up a truly impressive resume of auteurist directors that she’s managed to work with over the course of her short career), a young fashionista and amateur nostalgist who ventures from her childhood home in the village of Cornwall to attend fashion school in London. She assumes that she will naturally fit in, that the college might be full of eccentrics like her, and that the city might be a magical place like the one she’s often dreamed about in her small room, covered in posters for films like Sweet Charity and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and images of long-dead pop stars. Within a few hours, her notions of that sweet ol’ London town are totally dispersed: A cabbie, taking her from the train to her dorm, says some gross shit to her, and her roommate, Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen), a fashion-forward diva who dropped her last name because she figured it would be singular, turns out to be the kind of dickhead who talks shit about her roommate with the gaggle of gals she’s assembled as “friends” as they do blow in a pub toilet, unaware that Eloise is hiding — and crying — in the stall next to them. After a night on the couch in the common room, forced out by the fuckathon that Jocasta has with some rando from the club, Eloise begins looking for some sort of an escape, though she keeps telling her Gran that everything’s cool.
By sheer happenstance, she discovers a way out in the form of a notecard, lying on a hallway floor, having fallen from the bulletin board on which it was pinned: a spacious room on the top floor of a building in Soho, in which the renter specifies that she wants a young woman to occupy it. Sure enough, she’s able to secure the spot, a beautiful little space in a building owned by a stern yet kindly old pensioner (Diana Rigg, RIP), that’s always illuminated by the flashing neon signage of a French Bistro next door and practically the exact style that little Ellie has always dreamed of. But when she falls asleep that night, she experiences something absolutely wild — she’s transported to 1965 (helpfully solidified by the presence of a large advert for Thunderball over the marquee of the club she’s going to) and experiences/witnesses a night in the life of a young chanteuse named Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is making her big-time debut in London society, aiming to court the favor of the club’s owner so that she might perform there one day. She is immensely talented and impeccably styled, and it’s obvious to anyone who witnesses her skill that she’ll wind up at the top someday, should she be found by the right person. For a moment, it looks like that person might be Jack (Matt Smith), a talent manager who works in the local dives, who bravely “rescues” her from an unflattering advance from a piggish gent on the dance floor. She quickly falls in love with him (or at least his promises to her that he’ll advance her career) and slowly begins to realize that all is not what it seems with him: he’s a brutish thug whose ideas of “entertainment” are quite a bit different than Sandy’s. And every time she closes her eyes, Eloise is transported to this slowly-unfurling nightmare of perverted and failed hopes and dreams, until a specifically violent act, witnessed in half-waking life, causes the barrier between fantasy and reality to collapse.
That melding of the dream world and the real one is where Wright’s ship struggles the most, as the director elongates his concept to the point of nearly exhausting the audience. Some of his best imagery — which, in classic giallo tradition, would have perhaps been held until the final minutes before it was revealed, mainly due to budgetary concerns — is diluted by its earlier appearances in the narrative when it would have genuine shock value had it been unleashed at the last possible moment. It’s far too long — one could imagine a 97 minute cut of this, with extraneous fat trimmed, absolutely tearing down a house — and a brief subplot about Eloise’s visions of her dead mother is given too little shading to have a meaningful impact on what’s to come later on (the psychically-tuned girl being, of course, a classic character in these types of films). His scares rely too heavily on the “Lewton Bus” jump-scare, which does eventually pay off smartly in one of their most obvious fashions, but there are plenty of LOUD NOISES meant to make you react, which is bizarre, given how smart and creepily the atmosphere is rendered at all other times. But, in addition to all of these reasons, I think the aspect of Soho that will most likely upset Wright’s fanbase — you know, the ones who have composed odes to Scott Pilgrim‘s use of rhythmic editing or nerds who proclaimed Baby Driver to be a great musical — is that this is not a Cornetto Trilogy film, and those expecting plenty of humor or Wright’s normal assortment of complicated editing tricks will most likely be disappointed by its lack of (obvious) humor and its reliance on slow-and-steady pacing as well as its floating and airy cinematography, with many of its most impressive effects coming in-camera as a form of visual sleight-of-hand.
On the other hand, that’s exactly why Soho works so well for most of its runtime. Lensed by Chung-hoon Chung, Park Chan-Wook’s go-to cinematographer, the camerawork is often astonishing, with the mixed-format images that Wright chose for the project — the digitally-shot real world, full of grey and flat vistas, emphasizing the blandness of the modern, and the film-captured past, full of vivid color and the warm light that only 35mm film can properly capture in a cinematic way — succeeding in establishing a tonal difference that only becomes harder to distinguish as the film goes on. As alluded to above, in lieu of his typical editing bag of tricks, Wright’s focus here is on the camera, which owes more to the fluid dolly work of Max Ophuls than it does to any specific genre ancestor, as it glides, beautifully, across dance floors and the backrooms of nightclubs, awash in Bava-like neon color and mod glamor. The moments he creates are often lovely and immensely memorable, such as when Sandy descends a staircase into one of the largest clubs in London, clad in an impressive pink outfit (befitting the era, the costume design is absolutely fantastic), with Eloise as her literal mirror image, reflected in her stead in the reflective glass of the nightclub’s decor. The cast is well-selected to complement these images, and the presence of Rigg and Terence Stamp, who appears as a creepy patron of a local pub that Eloise begins to have her suspicions about, add authenticity to the proceedings. Rigg is dynamite here, but you’ll have to see the film to understand why, and to really get how she is being used. But the film’s two leads are also equally impressive, with Taylor-Joy serving up fierce looks left and right, and McKenzie giving Eloise’s naivety a genuine bitter sadness when her illusions of London are being shattered left and right, and her descent into madness is equally painful to witness and cathartic to see purged. And, boy, does this movie hum as well: Wright’s soundtracks have always been incredible, and there’s nothing quite like getting your brains rattled out of your skull by the sounds of the ’60s in a Dolby theater.
Yet that conflict between the longing for an imagined past (one Wright himself is in love with, given how many of the name-checked films on display here, like Scheslinger’s Darling and the aforementioned Sweet Charity, appear on the list of his 1000 favorite films that he assembled for Mubi a few years back) and the reality that not very much has changed in that interim outside of its aesthetics and, perhaps, its honesty, is a fascinating one to plumb. There’s an oft-quoted saying by Truffaut that there is no such thing as an “anti-war” film, given how, by its very nature, filmmaking inherently makes war exciting for the viewer, with the language of violence and our response to that stimuli firing up our passions in a way that even the most well-meaning of pacifist directors can’t help but stoke. This was, however, before Come and See was released, but there’s still some manner of truth to that idea. But I think that its application to films oriented around the recreation of a past era is appropriate, as even if its celebration of the glitz of the past is ultimately secondary to its intended point, as it is with so many revisionist works, it is almost impossible not to fall in the same traps that one would make when crafting a straight-up nostalgia circlejerk.
What’s interesting about Soho is how aware of it that is: Wright is absolutely aware of his fetishism for this period, much in the same way he was with his love for action cinema when he made Hot Fuzz, and, like that film, he’s advocating some form of moderation. It is okay to love the past, to admire the dresses and the music and the cinema, but it is important not to do so blindly: men were still creeps, the exploitation of women and the aspirational still ruled the day, and the veneer of propriety and style concealed abuse much in the same way it does now. What solution he proposes separates Soho from its relatives in the neo-giallo genre, in that he advocates for it as a form, by pulling from the positive from the past while embracing the modern world, ensuring that what needs to be buried stays that way. Because, after all, it’s now or never. There’s no going back.