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London's Soho district, the 1950s: Harry (Owen Drake), a young and
somewhat naive writer and philosopher, makes friends with James (Chris
Wellington), a jack-of-all-trades, poet, artist, actor, womanizer, and
through him gets sucked into the Soho lifestyle, meeting all sorts of
people, like filmmakers Marcus (Angus Howard) and Jo (Emily Seale-Jones),
who constantly argue about commercialism versus social relevance in their
movies, actress Myra (Lauren Harris), wannabe communist Marty (Olly
Warrington), who dates the origins of his fascination with communism to
way before Marx, the mysterious Count (William Chubb), who acts as
something of a father figure to Marcus, and Ironfoot Jack (Martin
Calcroft), about whom nobody knows whether he's a bum or an intellectual.
Other than in the rest of town (and the country), everybody here seems to
set on revolution of one sort or another, be it artistic, societal or
both, but nobody knows what the revolution ought to look like, and most of
the Soho-ites are driven by blind ambition rather than actual
accomplishment - and yet some beautiful art is made in Soho, while most of
its inhabitants are poor enough to live only from one meal to the next.
Harry eventually falls in love with Doreen (Caitlin Harris), a student
without a clear vision who like him has an outsider view of the
Soho-lifestyle. Harry also learns of Soho-itis, a sort-of
"disease" of fatal over-indulgence in the Soho lifestyle nobody
can really explain to him - until it hits too close to home ... Based
on Colin Wilson's 1961 book of the same name that was a first-hand account
of Soho then and there, this movie is just a wonderful patchwork that
really makes the era palpable through an ensemble piece that mixes made up
characters with actual ideas from back when but that doesn't lean too hard
towards one side or the other, instead shows empathy to all its
characters, and that's filmed in a style more reminiscent of 1950s Free
Cinema than anything else - and the film just looks and flows beautifully,
and even without a clear storyline manages to suck the audience in
throughout.
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