This irony about Eloise modeling herself after the fictional Holly character before doing the same with the ghost of Anya Taylor-Joy’s Sandie, another young woman whose life is actually far less glamorous than it first appears, is not lost on filmmaker Wright. In fact, when we chatted with him last month, he told us about all the ominous easter eggs of that otherwise sweetly innocent opening scene.
“I’m a big fan of Bob Fosse, full-stop,” Wright says when we mention another clear influence on Last Night in Soho: Bob Fosse’s movie version of Cabaret (1972). That film, which is also about a struggling lounge singer whose seedy life in Weimar Germany is less sumptuous than it initially appears, was just one in a series of Fosse favorites for Wright, who also lists All That Jazz (1979) and the film version of Sweet Charity (1969) as among his favorites.
“I love Sweet Charity, and there is a Sweet Charity poster in Eloise’s room at the start of Last Night in Soho,” Wright reveals. “And not just the Sweet Charity movie poster with Shirley MacLaine but also a photo of Judi Dench playing the character in the West End production of Sweet Charity is on the wall.”
For Wright the irony of Ellie idolizing media like Sweet Charity—which is about a “taxi dancer” who is paid a lump sum for every dance she will provide male patrons—gets to the shadowy underbelly of Last Night in Soho, and the danger of Eloise’s infatuation with the past.
“There’s something about the poster for Sweet Charity and Breakfast at Tiffany’s that speaks to the theme of the movie,” says Wright. “It’s that thing where the further you get away from it—like Breakfast at Tiffany’s becomes a famous poster that people own, and they might not have seen the movie. Do you know what I mean? It’s about Audrey Hepburn and Holly Golightly, and ‘Moon River,’ and then actually the darker side of the film gets forgotten. [It’s the same with] people that have posters on their wall for The sweet life and have never actually seen it or realized what a savage satire of that scene it is.”
He continues, “So in a way, that was the thing. Eloise has on her wall Sweet Charity and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, both ‘60s iconic classics that both have a darker side to them that people often forget.”