Yesterday

Richard Curtis films present a joyous and widely exportable vision of Britain: everything gleaming and not much grit, and the suffering is normally of a romantic kind. The effect is to send the audience back into the world satisfied that the dream of happy life and love is just a few plot-twists away. Sometimes, as with About Time, Curtis tarries with very light sci-fi notions, which is topical. Director Danny Boyle has confronted the yearning for happiness in a number of ways: sometimes through intravenous injection of hard drugs; winning the lottery; winning the Indian Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and getting Freida Pinto; cutting your arm off to free yourself after being trapped by a boulder… Oh, and ruling Apple with single-minded and evil self-belief…

So when you hear that Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle have made a film about a Britain where only one man can remember the songs of The Beatles, you know it’s bound to be fascinating and maybe also crazy. The Beatles dominate popular music and culture to the extent that most rock and roll groups since owe something to them, but on the other hand none has created such a varied catalogue of wonderful and fascinating music. The curiousness of this film begins with that premise, and adds a little local interest for those who’re from the East of England. Amateur musician Jack Malick (Himesh Patel) plays pubs and events in the Lowestoft area, working at a discount warehouse for money. His boss, who appears to have bought his Suffolk accent from Trago Mills, is comically unkind about Malick. His friends seem to follow him to every performance, but really only to shamelessly mock him. So he is at the struggling end of the music business, like when The Beatles had to mix songwriting with going to school.

There is one person who believes in him: his manager Ellie Appleton (Lily James), who is  also a schoolteacher (“Back in school again, Maxwell plays the fool again, Teacher gets annoyed”!!). A Lowestoft teacher who drives a new Mini?! That’s the Curtis magic: there are no second-hand cars for main players in the story.

A worldwide power-cut which lasts 12 seconds coincides with Malik being knocked off his bike by a bus at night (a bus at night in Rural Suffolk?!) When he wakes up he is in a world that’s unchanged save for the fact that nobody has heard of The Beatles or knows their songs. So when he plays ‘Yesterday’ on the guitar that his friends buy him, everyone thinks he’s written it—and so it’s not long before he’s playing ‘Hey Jude’ for his parents (Sanjiv Baskar and Mira Sayal, excellent comic relief). He is quickly discovered as he begins to pass off all the best known Beatles hits, becoming an international sensation. His arc of progress mirrors 1964 “British Beatlemania”, except that he is aided not by George Martin but Ed Sheeran. And whilst The Beatles had women screaming, Malik has picked up a spineless producer and has seen Ellie get together with one of their friends. And he is still bewildered at his situation.

On a character level it’s about working hard for something rather than being opportunistic and fake, in the service of an honesty worthy of Ellie. Because this is a romantic comedy as well as everything else… 

Everything Else? Everyone has a relationship with The Beatles, and the songs in the soundtrack are the hits rather than deeper cuts. This is not a film that’s going to incite the ire of Beatles fans who know most of the material. And if there’s a message it’s that the songs stand up, even when covered by others—which we mostly already knew. A lot of films that expound on the joy of making and sharing music, from Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman to
Music & Lyrics, are automatically better filmic experiences. Yesterday takes a couple of passes at properly following through on the implications of its sci-fi premise: the film’s big spoiler which is not even hinted at in the trailer. In fact there are two distinct parts to this, and a story that spent more time investigating that would have been more interesting but less popular and fun—but what they do is clever and audacious. Because Yesterday is also a sing-along classic, and the songs are infectiously good in their delivery. The rendition of “Help” at a seafront hotel in Gorleston-on-Sea may be my favourite scene because Himesh Patel genuinely sells the performance and the vocal, and the song is remarkably in-context. Lily James is also very good: at the beginning her belief in Jack seems like adoration, and is in stark contrast to the others around him who don’t believe in him at all. She is fun during the music montage, doing improvised percussion and some backing vocals. And the pivotal moment at the end is straight out of the romcom playbook. As if the audience needs reassuring the end title is an original Beatles song, and the colouring and text is all in the Beatles typeface with “Yellow Submarine” garishness. 

In short the film is an enjoyable run at a clever idea—I was doubtful and amused, but I loved it. It’s perhaps the most unrealistic romantic comedy in the history of cinema but there’s always reassurance in the notion that good honest ladies like good honest men.