The best time is the present!

Last Night in Soho (2021)

Director: Edgar Wright

We always like to think of the 'good old days' and how life was simpler then and people were honest. Were they really so? Artefacts from our pasts stir so much serotonin that nostalgia sells. Like Pavlov's dog, we drool at sephia photos of yesteryear. Would we really give up everything we have right now and recoil into the past and do it all again if those days were indeed so simple?

If we were to delve into our lives, we should consider ourselves lucky to have survived the negativities that could have brought us down at every single turn of our lives. We should thank our lucky stars that the turns we took at the crossroads of our decision-making moments turned out to be a-OK. Not perfect, could have been better than could have been worse off. What made us take the right turn? Is it some kind of guardian angel, guiding light, our sheer intellect or the deeds of our past karma? I guess it is a topic for the sophists to argue and convince, not the simpletons.

Nobody is saying that life is so easy that we should just accept life as it unfolds upon us without giving a good fight. We should not be fatalistic and just surrender to fate as fate is what we make of it. Akin to the conundrum of whether God had decided that war should commence would also depend on us sending the battleship. Even if God had decided that a battle should occur, it would not happen unless and until we send our armada! Future depends on us and our actions or inactions.

This film tries to us that any time can be a good or bad time. The present can be as challenging as the past and the future. There were injustices before, just as it is now and will be in time to come. Bigotry, bullying and wanting to domineer is engrained in our DNA.

Eloise, an aspiring fashion designer from the countryside, gets her break when accepted into the London College of Design. She grew up with her grandmother as her mother, a fashion design aspirant, killed herself when Eloise was young. Eloise sometimes sees visions of her mother. Longing to be with her mother, Eloise, showed a keen interest in things of the swinging 60s. In keeping with this motif, we are sprinkled with many of the British invasion songs of the 60s, e.g. Petula Clark (Downtown) and Cilla Black. A pleasant surprise inclusion is Dusty Springfield's 'Wishing and Hoping', James Ray's 'Got my mind set on you' (Cover by George Harrison in 1980s), Sandie Shaw's 'Always something there to remind me' (Cover by Naked Eyes in 1983) and many more.

Eloise found her batchmates quite repulsive of her background, and hence, she found her own accommodation. It appeared ideal for her as it appeared that time had stood still in that room. The settings were like the 60s. It was fine until she started having recurrent vivid nightmares in which she also became a participant and witnessed a murder.

After a heady rollercoaster ride into the past and future, Eloise finally resolves her issues and pursue her aspirations as how a good movie should end!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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