Sixties sexploitation swings back in Edgar… | Little White Lies

Six­ties sex­ploita­tion swings back in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho

03 Nov 2021

Two young women, one with blonde hair and the other with dark hair, sitting at a table with candles and a framed photograph in a dimly lit room.
Two young women, one with blonde hair and the other with dark hair, sitting at a table with candles and a framed photograph in a dimly lit room.
By dredg­ing up harm­ful stereo­types from the past, the film under­mines its post-#MeToo fem­i­nist narrative.

Edgar Wright’s new film Last Night in Soho holds a cracked mir­ror to London’s past, blur­ring the line between his­toric crimes and cur­rent events. Six­ties obsessed Eloise (Thomasin McKen­zie) moves to Lon­don from Corn­wall to study fash­ion design. Not long after arriv­ing she expe­ri­ences appari­tions of a night­club singer named Sandy (Anya Tay­lor-Joy), whose dream of star­dom turns into a night­mare when she is coerced into sex work by her man­ag­er Jack (Matt Smith). Soon, a horde of face­less men in three-piece suits begins to haunt Eloise.

Wright crafts an ambi­tious sto­ry with psy­che­del­ic visu­als and razor-sharp edit­ing. His film is a hyp­not­ic paint­ing of the past pack­aged as a neo-gial­lo. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Wright and co-writer Krysty Wil­son-Cairns’ attempt at a post-#MeToo cau­tion­ary tale is ill-judged for the deci­sion to use sex work as an alle­go­ry. The film’s treat­ment of his­tor­i­cal sex­u­al abuse, and the impli­ca­tion that women like Sandy are dam­aged and there­fore doomed to a life of crime and mis­ery, demonis­es sex work and per­pet­u­ates the dan­ger­ous stig­ma against sex workers.

On the BFI’s Let­ter­boxd page, Wright wrote: The 1960s casts a long shad­ow on Soho and I’ve long been fas­ci­nat­ed with the films of the peri­od that peek into the dark­er cor­ners of cen­tral Lon­don nightlife.” As influ­en­tial and revered as they are, both Alfred Hitchcock’s Fren­zy and Edmond T Gréville’s Beat Girl, to name just two of the films Wright list­ed as inspi­ra­tion, con­tain voyeuris­tic scenes of vio­lence against women whose pri­ma­ry roles are to endure abuse as a plot device.

Wright has also said, You can not change what’s hap­pened. You can only deal with it in the future,” in ref­er­ence to the 60s and the media’s roman­ti­ci­sa­tion of the era. Of course, con­text mat­ters: the 60s saw a seis­mic shift in pub­lic atti­tudes towards sex, which male direc­tors of the time were quick to cap­i­talise on. But to deal with it in the future” sug­gests that Wright set out to sub­vert cer­tain exploita­tive tropes. Instead, his film recy­cles them for its own grue­some ends, rev­el­ling in objec­ti­fy­ing imagery of women under the pre­tence of his­tor­i­cal accuracy.

There’s a scene where Anya Tay­lor-Joy is dressed in a doll-like bur­lesque cos­tume, per­form­ing a sex­u­alised dance rou­tine for a sea of male cus­tomers. While there’s noth­ing inher­ent­ly wrong with show­girl per­for­mances, the point of this scene is to demon­strate Sandy’s dis­com­fort with being sex­u­alised against her will. Although Sandy ver­bal­ly agrees to being a show­girl, she is intim­i­dat­ed and manip­u­lat­ed by Jack, who con­trols her by dan­gling the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a pros­per­ous future. Through­out the scene the cam­era lingers on Sandy, echo­ing the lyrics of Sandie Shaw’s Pup­pet on a String’. Coer­cion doesn’t equal con­sent, and so the camera’s posi­tion­ing makes the audi­ence a com­plic­it voyeur of Sandy.

A woman with red hair performing on stage under bright red lighting.

To give Wright the ben­e­fit of the doubt, the Pup­pet on a String’ scene could be jus­ti­fied as a means of visu­al­ly por­tray­ing men’s misog­y­nis­tic atti­tudes toward women dur­ing the 60s – yet the very next scene, in which Eloise explores the back­stage of the club, demer­its any cred­i­ble argu­ment. Behind every door is a dif­fer­ent woman in a sub­mis­sive posi­tion, engag­ing in fel­la­tio. Through­out Last Night in Soho, the audi­ence is bom­bard­ed with super­flu­ous sex­u­al imagery at the expense of its female char­ac­ters. There is some­thing hyp­o­crit­i­cal about cri­tiquing the past’s objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of women while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly par­al­lel­ing it.

Beyond the imagery, the trag­ic arc of Taylor-Joy’s char­ac­ter is under­pinned by an out­dat­ed sex work nar­ra­tive. Stripped of any agency, Sandy embod­ies a biased and harm­ful sex work­er stereo­type. She is pre­sent­ed as a meek vic­tim who needs sav­ing by Eloise, a mod­ern-day young woman. What­ev­er Wright’s inten­tions, it’s dis­ap­point­ing to see the film hur­tle towards an old-fash­ioned hor­ror trope where the fate of a female char­ac­ter is tied to her sex­u­al­i­ty. The film does attempt to redeem Sandy in its final act, but this only leads it into the even murki­er ter­ri­to­ry of false victimisation.

Anoth­er scene seem­ing­ly unaware of its impli­ca­tions con­cerns Eloise’s love inter­est, John (Michael Ajao). When the cou­ple climb into bed togeth­er for the first time, Eloise hal­lu­ci­nates that Jack is attack­ing Sandy. Her con­fu­sion trans­lates into har­row­ing screams and pleas for John to stop. On the one hand this scene, which boils down to a white woman cry­ing wolf against an inno­cent Black man, broach­es the com­plex pow­er dynam­ic between women and men in both the past and present. On the oth­er it is a val­i­da­tion of the what if she’s lying’ sex­u­al abuse defence that is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the fem­i­nist nar­ra­tive the film is appar­ent­ly striv­ing for.

Last Night in Soho is paved with good inten­tions but ulti­mate­ly miss­es the mark. Wright told Empire mag­a­zine, There’s some­thing I have in com­mon with the lead char­ac­ter in that I’m afflict­ed with nos­tal­gia for a decade I didn’t live in.” But in attempt­ing to high­light the tox­i­c­i­ty of the past while pay­ing homage to the sex­ploita­tion films that were pop­u­lar in the 60s, the direc­tor proves that those who fail to learn from his­to­ry are doomed to repeat it.

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