Emilia Clarke in a scene from 'Last Christmas'
"It's a love letter to London." At least that's what she says about Last Christmas its director, Paul Feig. And he is not without reason, if we take into account that the story between **Kate (Emilia Clarke) and Tom (Henry Golding) ** is woven through the nooks and crannies of a sparkling London of Christmas.
as i did Love Actually in 2003, but going one step further and making the viewer accompany the protagonists through the streets, who become Tom's witnesses and allies to get Kate to react.
And yes, when you see it, you let yourself be rocked by the placidity caused by the common universes of romantic movies. That's why, the outcome there are those who are caught off guard.
To the rhythm of George Michael's classic Last Christmas, which, in addition to being the title of the film, is the central theme of its soundtrack, Kate and Tom evolve.
From the first distrustful encounters in the fictitious Yuletide Wonderful, the magic of Christmas made into a store, to the intimacy they manage to create in the phoenixgarden, with that flirtatious bench that leaves the chaos of sevendials, the nearby seven-block intersection where Kate will run through traffic dragging her wobbly suitcase. All condensed into a handful of central London streets.
"We did it guerrilla style. Emilia was there waiting and I yelled 'Ready and go! Run' and she ran in the middle of the traffic. It's a very authentic London scene." Feig tells about this scene in a promotional video.
In between, a walk through the narrowest alley in London, Brydges Place, that the spectator will end up knowing with the nickname of fat pressure and identifying by the hundreds of little yellow lights that frame the flow of Kate and Tom; Y talks and junk food on the Embankment, with the London Eye in the background. And always, a message that Tom repeats like a mantra: "look up".
Kate and Tom in Phoenix Garden
And it turns out that Henry Golding is right, that, in that walk looking at the ground or at the mobile, we lose the details that cities keep in their heights. What the Lombard Street grasshopper or those mice that the two of them observed an curiously and that, although they seem to be just around any corner in central London, they are actually quite a bit further away, in Philpot Lane.
Kate in the Christmas store
This map, curious, delicate and well pastel, also includes the locations of the St Mary's Hospital, where everything begins or everything ends (depending on how you look at it); of St. Mary's Church on Wyndham Place, the place where Kate gradually becomes more generous; and of Leather Lane Market, whose positions serve for Emilia Clarke to strengthen ties with her fictional mother, an Emma Thompson who plays a Yugoslav refugee and who, faced with the images of the demonstrations in favor of Brexit, clairvoyant, does not hesitate to say that First, a group is pointed out as being responsible for all the evils and, later, when people believe it, that group is persecuted.
The map of 'Last Christmas'