South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Wright’s ‘Last Night in Soho’ explores dangers of nostalgia
It’s a few hours before the world premiere of Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho” at the Venice
Film Festival earlier this year, and Wright is getting a little teary eyed. He’s telling a story about Dame Diana Rigg. It’s a good one, too, involving Campari and soda on the last day he saw her. Most stories involving Rigg have a supporting Campari-and-soda part.
It’s a story he has told before and will certainly tell again since a few weeks after that encounter she died at age 82. But Wright has become acutely aware that it’s impossible to separate this movie, a passion project of his for over 10 years, from the surreal experience of not only working with a star who had epitomized 1960s glamour, but also befriending and losing her.
But if there ever was a film fit for reflection about past, present, fantasy and reality, “Last Night in Soho” is it. The stylized story imagines a young, 1960s-obssessed fashion designer, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), who travels to London for school. When she finds a room to rent in Soho, she begins having increasingly realistic dreams about the era and a singer, Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), that starts out as sparkling, Champagne fun, but takes a sinister turn the deeper she goes.
“The movie is essentially about the dangers of nostalgia,” Wright said of the film now in theaters. “There is no magical decade where everything was great. It’s just a fallacy to suggest that that exists.”
It is an exciting departure for Wright, who has become known for a particular brand of referential humor.
Wright had originally envisioned Taylor-Joy as Eloise. He told her as much when he met her in 2015 just as she was breaking out after her turn in the indie horror “The Witch.” But when Sandie started developing into a richer character during the writing process, he realized that it was meant for her.
“It was sort of having seen her in other films and even just seeing her on the carpet,” Wright said. “She’s almost like a silent movie star, isn’t she?”
This meant he was now without an Eloise. Then someone suggested 18-year-old McKenzie.
“This was definitely a project that I chased. It wasn’t offered to me,” McKenzie said. “I was at a very similar stage in my life ... She’s a young girl with big aspirations, big hopes, a little bit shy and uncertain, but determined to kind of prove herself and making her way to the big city and then kind of being overwhelmed with everything that came with that journey.”
The parallels didn’t stop there. She and her character were coming to London at age 18, and her grandmother would be played by Rita Tushingham, who made “A Taste of Honey” when she was 18 in 1961.
“I loved the relationship between Ellie and her grandmother. I’ve lived with my grandmother my entire life. She’s 94 now,” McKenzie said. “In a way, I did this film in honor of her career.” McKenzie’s grandmother, actor Kate Harcourt, was made a dame in New Zealand for her contributions to theater.
Wright also wrote a meaty role for another major name of the era, Terence Stamp. It’s a nod not just to actors he grew up loving, but also an acknowledgment that many of those stars of the past are still vital and working today. In “Soho,” Rigg, Stamp and Tushingham aren’t just there for “tokenry,” he said. They are pivotal parts they all wanted to play.
Wright mostly relished the opportunity to both pay tribute to and expose an era that has increasingly been reduced to something of a false novelty.
The last day he saw Rigg to loop some lines, she was bedridden. They did their work and sipped Campari and soda and then just chatted for an hour.
Wright was working with his editor when word came that Rigg had passed.
“That day,” he said, “We put the dedication at the start of the movie.”