Eloise falls asleep in her new room, and in her dreams she sees herself back in mid-sixties London as an aspiring pop singer with a blond bouffant and a pink tent dress who aggressively pushes her way into a night club, into an interview with a slick young operator named Jack (Matt Smith), and into a job backup dancing at a burlesque club. Collins (the late Diana Rigg) that’s, coincidentally, well preserved in sixties styles-of an altogether different sort from that of her bedroom in Cornwall, rumpled and functionally un-chic. (Fair warning: some spoilers ahead.) Eloise has a roommate from Hell, the vain and envious Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen), and when, on the first night in the dorm, Eloise ends up bedless because of a wild party, she rents a room in a private home owned by Ms. (Eloise never knew her father.) Thus, Eloise goes to London on a heroine’s journey of ancestral redemption-and, in the process, faces up to the misogynist monstrosity of swinging London that rendered it unendurable for her mother and for other women who ended up destroyed by it.Īn overly complicated and contrived series of setups turns Eloise’s life in the city, which starts in a sterile, modern dormitory, into a haunted-house tale. Eloise’s mother once had similar ambitions, but London (as Peggy explains) was too hard for her she was also mentally ill, and died by suicide when Eloise was seven. But the backstory that explains this quest seems borrowed from a screenwriters’ manual of prefabricated motives. She has raised Eloise on the music and the myths of that era, and Eloise heads to the London College of Fashion in order to fulfill her retro visions. It’s a period that Peggy looks back on nostalgically. But the form that is imposed on the film’s significant and worthy ideas ends up stifling their clear and considered expression.Įloise, who’s eighteen, is an aspiring fashion designer whose bedroom, in the house in Cornwall where she lives with her grandmother, Peggy (Rita Tushingham), is a shrine to the pop culture of the swinging London of the mid-sixties. The script (which Wright co-wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns) expands this concept into a social history that fuses with horror-movie tropes to reveal an extravaganza of stifled nightmares that Eloise will have to confront in order to succeed. It’s shaped like a classic coming-of-age tale: a young provincial, Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), goes to the metropolis to realize her dreams and, in the process, has her illusions dispelled. In Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho,” the message gets garbled in transit between the film’s epigrammatic conceit and its cinematic form. Sometimes a movie clearly represents a filmmaker’s effort to say something, to send a proverbial message.
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