As Edgar Wright’s latest film, Last Night in Soho, gains the praise it deserves, one can’t help but reflect on how Wright is tapping into the very thing his film cautions against: “retromania.” And it isn’t just something being done through wielding the 60s as a seductive time period (therefore an equally as seductive soundtrack), but also by essentially “borrowing” an idea that was already made into a film in the recent past: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.
Cancelled or not, this 2011 movie snagged Allen an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, despite (or possibly because of) Allen’s incorporation of two extreme cliches: Paris and a lust for a bygone time period called the Roaring Twenties (unlike the current Boring Twenties). And yet, for whatever reason, no one had thought to take Allen’s “fresh” approach to the past after the likes of Back to the Future seemed to make time travel an all but stale genre for everyone else (until, that is, Dark came along). But then Allen showed up to wield the “novel” angle of his protagonist, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson, who has pivoted entirely to the “other Woody Allen,” Wes Anderson), having the unique ability to tap into the past without ostensibly needing to enter a “dream state” the way Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) in Last Night in Soho does in order to connect with her own personal heroine, Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy).
Whereas Sandie is a “common” woman with a past that can’t be “dreamed up” by mere “writerly imagination,” the personae of famous luminaries of arts and letters from the 1920s seem, more than anything, to be projections of how Gil sees them in his mind (ergo, Woody Allen’s). Though we can never really know for sure if the time traveling vehicle that rolls up in front of the Saint-Étienne-du-Mont every night at midnight is real, or all part of Gil’s reverie, the entire purpose of the film, like Last Night in Soho, is to spotlight the dangers of romanticizing previous epochs. As for Gil’s fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), she’s much more pragmatic. A.k.a. far less of a dreamer—and certainly not one to romanticize anything, least of all something as “cheesy” as Paris.
“You’re in love with a fantasy,” Inez tells Gil at the beginning of the movie as they walk through Monet’s garden in Giverny (empty of other tourists, of course… though that would never happen in real life). The fantasy of things being “better” “back then.” Even though we know that they actually were by sheer virtue of diminished global warming patterns and a higher value placed on intellectualism (even in Dullard City, USA). No one is around in Last Night in Soho to really warn Ellie of this fact, except her landlady, Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg), who asks her why she’s so into the 60s. After all, it was her time, not Ellie’s. However, Ms. Collins is willing to agree with Ellie that the music back then was definitely better. For she can hear Ellie blasting the likes of Sandie Shaw and Petula Clark every night on the record player she brought with her from Cornwall.
The presence of a record player emitting music of the past is also integral to Midnight in Paris, with Gil being lured over to an antique area where Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), his eventual “true” love interest, is selling her wares. Namely, a phonograph that just so happens to be playing Cole Porter. One of many famous artists Gil has encountered “in real life” thanks to the blip in time that occurs outside of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont at midnight.
After Gil’s first night experiencing the bizarre and inexplicable phenomenon, he implores Inez to join him, assuring her she’s about to embark upon an unforgettable “adventure.” Inez is willing to play along—for a bit—before she ends up leaving right before midnight, just when Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) comes through to pick him up.
Having previously encountered Hemingway at Le Polidor in le sixième, this locale serves as Gil’s very own Café de Paris in Soho, where Ellie first goes on her inaugural adventure into the past. Her beloved Swinging Sixties, the decade she was once convinced she could never find any fault with, but suddenly starts to grow disenchanted with as she watches what befalls Sandie every night. As Paul (Michael Sheen), Inez’s pompous friend and obvious paramour as the story goes on, informs Gil, “Nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present. The name for this fallacy is called Golden Age thinking. The erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one [you’re] living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” If that’s the case, then a great majority are suffering from “Golden Age thinking.” Or what Mark Fisher might call “hauntology”—a present haunted by the past, with the promise of no real future. Nothing “new” (read: innovative) on the horizon. Therefore a constant need to seek solace in the past. To somehow try to incorporate it into the present as something “contemporary.” The same way Amy Winehouse did with her Back to Black record.
Even “2010” (the year Midnight in Paris is supposed to be set) has a nostalgic quality to it now, complete with Gil’s ability to seemingly have no phone on his person and therefore still be able to get “lost” in the city without the crutch of simply looking up directions (then again, a trademark of Allen’s is never featuring technology of any kind in his movies). A certain agreement to go down a rabbit hole arises when the 1920s revelers in the car urge him to join them inside of it. What causes this phenomenon—this strange wormhole—no one knows. Could be a glitch in the matrix, could be a psychotic break. With Ellie, it appears to be more the latter (at least in the eyes of others), though everything she sees is very real, and all adds up historically in the present day. A “place” she returns to when the night is over and she wakes up to the sound of her alarm. Except one morning, when a malfunction in the space-time continuum occurs, and a “client” that Sandie was entertaining breaks through into the present to continue chastising “Sandie” (now Ellie) for pretending to be asleep.
The similarities in plot device and motif extend even to each film title relying on place to evoke an immediate association. For both locations—Soho and Paris—align with a certain time period in people’s minds. Whether it’s the Belle Époque for the latter or the Swinging Sixties for the former.
In spite of their best intentions to resist it, both characters become increasingly intoxicated with the past with every passing night that they spend in it. Until, that is, the past turns sour—more so for Ellie than it does Gil. In fact, Allen’s inescapable chauvinist vantage point is what makes it so much more enjoyable for Gil to return to one of many white cisgender male heydays. In contrast, Ellie quickly learns just how unpleasant it is for women to exist in a decade that wasn’t really that long ago. And even in the present, it’s not all that “divine” for women, so one can hardly imagine the treachery of such a grotesque period in anti-feminism.
While Gil experiences nothing but good times in the past, Ellie is forced to contend with gruesome realities about the nature of humanity, and men in particular, while on her time traveling journey. Yet even in spite of all the wondrous evenings Gil enjoys, he still isn’t satisfied, coming to the conclusion, “The present is always going to seem unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying.” And if this is coming from the most privileged kind of human, Gil probably can’t even begin to envision how it must feel for others.
Last Night in Soho may have filched a key aspect of the premise from Midnight in Paris, but Wright’s is obviously the superior film—and it isn’t just because Allen is firmly “donezo” as far as “the industry” is concerned or because he can’t help but render everything from a hopelessly “out-of-touch, rich, East Coast liberal old man” perspective. But because, more than Midnight in Paris, Wright’s thematic depiction goes for a more multi-faceted approach on how the past affects us negatively. On one side of the coin, there is the reality that things were “better” in many regards in comparison to the present, which thus makes us yearn for a time outside our own. On the other, the revelation that every era has its drawbacks can send a lot of people into an alternate form of existential despair. Then there is the exploration of the past on a personal level, how our own specific trauma can mutate us into something we never thought we could be. This is a concept Allen wouldn’t dare explore in his own ruminations about past versus present, keeping it as general as possible. Another important element Last Night in Soho toys with that Midnight in Paris does not is how nostalgia feeds everything (specifically capitalism) that exists in the present (particularly pop culture, including Ellie’s chosen field of fashion).
For Allen, who actually did rise to prominence in pop culture in the “Swinging Sixties” (with a script [What’s New Pussycat?] set in Paris, no less), it would seem that rather than addressing some of the previous traumas that made him into the sort of man who would, say, molest a child, he prefers to forever live in the “purer” past of his youth that he has continued to glorify throughout his career—from Love and Death to Zelig to Radio Days. Evidently, he has yet to see any zombie-ghosts emerge from the floorboards to make him feel otherwise. Unless, perhaps, they’re all quite comfortable together on the Upper East Side. Where Allen’s movie is classified as “fantasy comedy,” Wright’s is a “psychological horror film”—the strongest indication of how the same premise can be remade into something entirely different… and more accurate.
