This is a story about “Last Night in Soho”The first appearance was inBelow-the Line Issueof ’s awards magazine.
Edgar Wright’s sumptuous thriller “Last Night in Soho” follows young Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer in the present who moves from the country to London’s posh Soho district and inadvertently winds up occupying the life of young singer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) in the 1960s.
One of the film’s most striking sequences is Eloise’s initial trip back in time as she follows Sandie into the upscale nightclub Café de Paris. (The actual club was closed in 2020 due to the pandemic. It’s a moment that is full of showstopping razzle-dazzle, much of it coming from costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux’s outfits and longtime Wright collaborator Marcus Rowland’s intricate production design. As Sandie walks into the club, she’s flanked by a giant staircase lined with mirrors. As she takes each step, Eloise (in her pajamas—this time-travel business only happens at night) takes the same step, only in the mirror. “The mirrors were in there, and they were in the script,”Rowland added. “Some of it was trial and error, really.” For Sandie’s descent down the stairs, they thought about building a separate “duplicate staircase”Eloise behind the main stairs, but the idea was dropped. A motion-control Steadicam was used to achieve the shot. It could be repeated with either one or both actresses, to be blended later.
Rowland was quick in pointing out that there’s still time for a “double set”—when Sandie hands over her coat and looks in the mirror, and we see Eloise in the reflection. “At one point, the mirror slides across so you get the proper reflection as well,”Rowland added. “That’s all choreographed to happen at a particular point.”It’s natural that a movie about going back in time would use the same old-school techniques.
The scene’s most important aspect is Sandie’s dress. It is a flowing, elegant gown that has to have an impact on Eloise and the audience. Dicks-Mireaux admitted that the costume’s place in the narrative did add pressure. “The things that made me a little nervous were that I’ve got to do a fashion show at the end, and I’ve got to design a dress that will inspire that fashion show,”She said. Dicks-Mireaux understood that Sadie was the character. “was not a couture countess, she’s just an ordinary girl,”This was the inspiration for her design. “Her dress has to be believable, one that she could have had made,”She said. “The idea was to put a kind of tent quality over the shift of the period, so we had a little bit more to play with than just the silhouette of the period.”
But even when they finally settled on the dress, Dicks-Mireaux wasn’t totally sold. “The thing that I was most worried about was that she would look pregnant,”She said. “I was having a few sleepless nights over that.”Wright and Taylor Joy had both approved it, but she was still unsure if she should extract more to give it more shape. Like all things related to “Last Night in Soho,” an answer arrived from the past: the fact that Monica Vitti wore a similar dress in 1966’s Modesty Blaise. “That reassured me,”She said.
You can read more in the Below-the Line Issue here.
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