Swinging Sixties superstars Diana Rigg, Rita Tushingham and Terence Stamp and a soundtrack stacked with hits from that era all make for a nostalgia saturated cinematic experience in Edgar Wright’s super stylish LAST NIGHT IN SOHO.
Thomasin McKenzie stars as Eloise, a fledgling fashion designer obsessed with the past, longing for a bygone age, desperate to have experienced 60s London in all its glory. It’s a psychic link with her dear departed mother.
Accepted into a prestigious design school in London, Eloise moves from the sticks to follow her dream, a dream that evolves into a nightmare of neon and nylons.
Her fist nightmare experience in firmly rooted in reality when moving into her drab student halls, Eloise is immediately intimidated by her mean girl roommate Jocasta and her fashion-forward friends. Despite the attempts of her empathetic classmate John to encourage her, Eloise can’t stand the all-night parties. Instead, she finds a room for rent at the top of an old house owned by landlady Ms Collins. It’s there, still unsettled yet hopeful for a new start, that Eloise slips away into dreams of the 1960s.
Entry to a parallel universe circa 1966 should be a paradise but temptation precedes a fall as Eloise finds herself inhabiting the life of Sandie, a 1960s starlet in the making, a wannabe singer, dancer, actress, star – and she’s dead set on making an impression.
Eloise immediately adopts Sandie as her role model and guiding spirit, dyeing her hair to look more like her heroine and living for the nights when she can re-join the past in her dreams.
Dopplegangers and dreams and deep buried secrets drape every frame of LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, where style trumps story, image leverages narrative.
Thomasin McKenzie is dazzling as Eloise as is Anya Taylor-Joy as Sandie.
Acclaimed South Korean cinematographer, Chung-hoon Chung serves up a rich palette of vivid colour and dark recess, rhapsodising every aspect of Marcus Rowland’s lush production design.
And appropriately amazing for a film whose central character is a fashion designer, costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux provides thrilling apparel for this eerie era bending, error blending flash splash.
Richard Cotter