The Long Take: In Defense of Last Night In Soho’s Ending
The film's final act does not betray its ideals of womanhood. It remains maintained. [Spoilers Obviously]
Niles Schwartz tweeted that October is usually the most interesting month for movies because the releases usually inspire heated online conversations. When it comes to this year’s releases - Dune, No Time To Die, The French Dispatch, The Last Duel, and Last Night in Soho - it’s certainly the most interesting; a diverse array of blockbusters and mid-budget indies driven by auteur chic, one of which was delayed because of the pandemic.
Last Night in Soho, directed by Edgar Wright, inspired a lot of rage on Twitter and Letterboxd. It takes the designed-to-be-controversial title that was previously held by Joker and also shares that film’s sense of urban detachment. If Joker’s take on society is based on the haves and have-nots, Last Night in Soho deals with the autonomous and the autonomous-perceived that’s been a core within feminist debates for decades. It brought what had been typical in Edgar Wright’s oeuvre: nostalgia is for suckers, and they harm young women too. The reception has been lukewarm, and more attention has been focused on its final act, which some will argue flies in the face of its critique of patriarchal norms. That is, what I think, is currently the critical consensus of the film. Needless to say, I feel that this criticism is rooted in bad faith. The final act does present a message that is morally fair, even if much of it is middlingly executed.
Here’s a summary of what happened before this act.
Eloise, a fashion student moves to London and is turned off by the unrestrained hookup culture there. Because she cannot fit in with her promiscuous uni mates, she moves into a Soho hostel that was once vacated by Sandie, who dreamt of becoming a singer. Both women share this kinship that Eloise is transported into her dreams. And given that Eloise is also fixated with the sixties, escaping into a fantasy only she can feel comfortable with. Her aesthetics doesn’t just channels the sixties. It transforms her. This is marred, however, through meeting Sandie’s agent-slash-lover Jack (no pun intended), played by Matt Smith. She performs at a burlesque house and never got to her dreams of singing at the club. In order to survive, Sandie becomes his prostitute and is uncomfortable with the punters she sleeps with, and becomes a victim, in the same bedroom that Eloise sleeps in. But the truth is... Sandie wasn’t the victim. She killed not just Jack, but many of the men she had been booked with. The Sandie then, is now Alexandra (Diana Rigg), the caretaker of the Soho hostel.
So far, the complaint hasn’t been that the warm old lady was the killer the entire time (an egregious use of this trope, check out Prisoners), but that the morale was muddled by switching the positions unfairly, while many other things are happening. That argument would make it completely understandable if that was the one actually being made by the movie. Because the thesis isn’t that women are responsible for the violence made against them. It’s that Eloise is too burdened by the extreme norms of society and her fixations, contributing to her spiraling out.
London is a grimy place to stay, and the film establishes that within the first fifteen minutes; Eloise’s grandmother warns her of the places you must avoid, she is reminded of her mother’s suicide; ads of escorts on the phone booth, a skeevy tramp played by Terrence Stamp. And that’s just the beginning. Most importantly, our protagonist is so introverted and avoids risks, that only her 60s fantasy serves as a cautionary tale: once she exerts her newfound confidence, it will carry some baggage.
Marie Bardi, a podcast producer if there was ever one, called Last Night in Soho the most sex-negative movie she has ever seen, barring the fact that works that came before like Taxi Driver and Hardcore existed. It certainly demonstrates that the dichotomy dividing the beliefs of current mores dominated by an aggressive hook-up culture and the attitudes of excessively restrained sexual mores, usually found in second-wave feminism, is helpless. Eloise is correct that the pressures to be had in interacting with other men would be too much for her. However cocooning herself to a decade, where it seemed like the Sexual Revolution would begin to ease the prudishness of sex, would have enabled her to be much more in danger. This results in Alexandra, who bars entry to her hostel from men because she had been hurt by them. That balance managed to be struck, in spite of its misdemeanors.
Stamp’s womanizing copper Lindsay, a frequent patron of a pub Eloise works at, turns out to be innocent and whose good intentions are belied by the sleaziness experienced by her and Sandie. When he met Sandie, he asked her for his real name, which would be the first impression one would have. He’s not the only nice guy who gets misjudged. John, a fashion student at Eloise’s class, is often passive in a way the archetype usually isn’t. Instead of intervening against her antics, he is understanding of her issues to fit in, and yet his character is sidelined to make another moral point, which is that what people pejoratively label as “nice guys” are indeed the nice guy. It’s a lesson of #NotAllMen, which makes its opponents all the more uncomfortable
Wright is a veteran of ensuring that nostalgia doesn’t overshadow critical thinking, but also believes that individuals are aware of their autonomy that they have to fight for it. In The World’s End, it makes that sole argument for men who are past their prime. Last Night In Soho shows that a woman’s agency is to be ensured, rather than earned, which is what the naysayers had assumed upon watching it until the final minutes.
In a sense, Last Night in Soho is the sister movie to Sucker Punch. That movie, however, misinterpreted and filmed, showcased a woman succumbing to her own fantasy, where one of her new friends manage to escape the asylum. But Soho has far more taste, mainly because the cinematography is eye-popping and that the music cues do come off inspired. is a mess that’s made possible by having three different acts with varying tones. It starts out a coming-of-age story, then a whodunnit, and finally a Giallo-inspired horror film. Edgar Wright has proven in the past that he can mashup genres into something that is a class of its own. Soho doesn’t cohere itself to the narrative it set out and I certainly feel that some of the characters would have benefitted with further development, rather than sticking to a certain archetype. That its conclusion devolved from whatever the moral virtues it has exerted make less sense.