Hi, little raven!
Have you ever seen the tiktok’s of the pretty lady that brings her grandmothers fashion designs to light? That’s exactly what the 2021 movie Last Night in Soho reminds me of.
The movie follows Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer out of the English countryside into the city of London, where she has dreams and visions of a wanna-be singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor Joy).
I watched this movie for the first time sometime last year, and I’ve watched it a handful of times since then.
It’s a good movie, honestly, the casting is pretty damn good. In the movie, when Eloise has dreams of Sandie for the first time, we see Sandie most of the time, and we often times see Eloise in the mirror. She’s either living through Sandie or standing on the outside. And I believe she’s also schizophrenic, it’s noted on throughout the movie, and implied that she likely takes after her mother who ‘couldn’t handle London.’
I love moves that sort of dip themselves back and forth in and out of reality. And this movie sort of feels like a dream I would’ve had, because I do have dreams where I’m someone else. It’s very disorienting to wake up in a different reality and you can’t revisit, going back to your real life and daydreaming about that other person you lived as, that other, lavish life.
No wonder Eloise was so obsessed.
I think at one point in the movie, Eloise turns to methods of lucid dreaming. She’d drawing Sandie in her fashion designs, in her iconic pink dress. She’s playing the same song nightly to steep herself back in that reality.
And then it gets to her. Eloise steeps herself so deeply in this reality that she becomes Sandie. Her hair, her fashion sense, the continuous appearance of Sandie in her work.
Between this and the continuous appearance of a man— and eventually the appearance of multiple ghosts of men Sandie has murdered, in all honesty in self-defense.
Finding out that Sandie was alive the whole time was the part that fucked me, because she tries to kill Eloise for having figured her out and wanting to go home. She was Eloise’s land lady. She slept in Eloise’s bed and everything.
And it kinda fucked me too, I can’t lie. Thomasin and Anya need to be put in more movies together, because even before Eloise, in the movie went blonde, they already looked so similar it may be uncanny.
I feel like if I were to write something like this… I could maybe pull it off. Maybe.
As per usual, I’m writing before the actual substack needs to go out, and I have way too many projects on the dome that won’t be written for a bit, so we won’t have a LNIS wip anytime soon.
I think for Venus Day, we will have a ‘everything I want to write’ because I have been thinking about all the things I want to write lately! We shall see though!
I will see you all soon!
Love,
Rownan