Last Night at Soho
A nice little musical horror. Falters towards the end, but it does not drown in a pool of its own blood, it only has some scars from deep knife cuts.
The genre trappings and conventions overpower what could be a better story and message. It actually undermines most of its message, it’s all about the cool genre set pieces. Despite the happy ending, this has a fairly low cosmopolitrometer rating, those city slickers are a bunch of sexpots, louts, and killers.
Some bumpkin girl gets into a London fashion school, but her granny warns her about moving to the big city, being around so many people. She’s already not too stable, since her mother killed herself and she sees her in mirrors all the time.
She gets her first smack of city life in the cab trip, being outright harassed by the driver. She escapes into a small shop, fearing more stalking. After arriving on the student lodgings, her roommate Jocasta is the alpha bitch, extremely self-centred and constantly throwing nasty barbs at her. Jocasta is the mother/wife of Oedipus, a bit on the nose that choice of name.
Only one of his colleagues is really friendly, but she is too busy to give him the time of day. Busy buying old clothes and dyeing her hair blonde, to match the Sandie girl she tracks in her vivid dreams during the night. This gives her a boost to ace the fashion stuff, until she discovers the seedy underbelly of Soho’s “GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS” nightclubs. You’re nightclub people, aren’t ya? TODO 24 Hours Party People?
Yes, she throws herself at some agent that promises to get her on stage fast, but it turns out to be sleazy Crazy Horse shit, some depressing Puppet on a String cover (that’s Sandie Shaw!). That’s bad enough, but she comes back into the club and it outright pimped out to some sleazeball. And just like that she’s in, a bottle service girl, being pimped to the highest bidder, and her artistry is just an ad for whoring.
She even finds out this was prearranged: when she met him, there was some sleazeball that tried to fuck her in the club, and the agent smacked him for calling her a whore and a slut. But they were in cahoots.
These kind of visions, interactive flashbacks are the best part of the film, and they continue always, but the first ballroom dance is the best. Afterwards, the inspiration is more Poltergeist and The Exorcist (on the sheets), Suspiria (on the streets), and Ghostbusters on the library.
There are only minor references to the deeper themes: gentrification, feminism, mental health and bullying, but that gets undermined by having the heroine having to work as barmaid to support blowing 400 quid on a white trenchcoat, not being able to kill her bully, and not avoiding the suicide by fire of Sandie in the end.
The fact that it’s already not very feminist and the accusations that the John-esus Christ love subplot was hammered in to avoid the implication the main character is a lesbian… ooof. She does spend most of the film lusting at a blond girl.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.