The dazzling new movie Last Night in Soho is a bizarro-world version of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Both movies are about the …
The dazzling new movie Last Night in Soho is a bizarro-world version of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Both movies are about the power of nostalgia. Tarantino’s wonderful picture took one of modern history’s most disturbing real-life horror stories—the Manson family murders—and transmuted it into crazy comedy. It was a deliberate sanitization of the truth about 1960s Los Angeles, a conscious study of the power movies have when it comes to romanticizing the past. Last Night in Soho, from the singularly gifted writer-director Edgar Wright, does exactly the opposite. It’s the story of Ellie, a young British would-be fashion designer, who hungers so deeply for the culture and glamour of 1960s London that she begins to time-travel there in her dreams—and then must suffer as those exciting and beautiful dreams slowly turn into terrifying nightmares. Ellie, who has inherited either her late mother’s schizophrenia or her supernatural sensitivity, watches (and partially inhabits the body of) Sandie—herself a young would-be chanteuse who lived in the same flat Ellie now inhabits, but six decades earlier. During the day, in contemporary London, Ellie walks the same streets in Soho she sees Sandie dancing through at night. Theater marquees selling Sean Connery in Thunderball lead to the entrances to glamorous smoke-filled supper clubs where Sandie hopes to work as a singer and dancer.
