Yesterday

Yesterday (2019) is a romantic comedy twisted around a promising premise that, unfortunately, has nothing to with the film's love story.  A handsome young man, apparently of Pakistani ethnicity, performs songs that he has composed as a street busker and at low energy, low profile festivals.  His career as a musician is going nowhere notwithstanding his enthusiasm and the assistance of a perky and beautiful school teacher who serves as his "manager" --as the film shows us, there's really nothing to manage.  The young musician is in love with the school teacher, although he's too self-centered to understand his emotions and the girl is too proud to force the issue.  Through an inexplicable chain of events, the young man becomes a famous pop star.  Fortune and glory tug him in different directions.  The course of true love, as is said, never runs true.  But after some trials and misunderstandings, the young man expresses his love for the girl, marries her, and lives happily ever after, relinquishing his fame in favor of his relationship with her.  (The film doesn't persuasively explain why the young man's fame is necessarily inconsistent with his love for the school teacher --this is simply a convention of a movie like this which we must accept on faith.)  The story isn't particularly compelling although the players are young, pretty, and convincingly ardent.  I have outlined the gist of the film in this nutshell.

But, of course, the film's hook --  it's gimmick, as it were -- is the manner in which the unprepossessing musician achieves fame.  This is the film's other premise which is fertile, but not effectively worked-out.  Through some kind of international and world-wide power outage, reality is subtly warped -- certain aspects of pop culture simply vanish without a trace.  The young musician is hit by a bus in the black-out, loses some teeth and has to be hospitalized.  When he is released from the hospital, his friends give him a new guitar to replace the one lost in the accident with the bus.  He tries out the guitar, playing the Beatles' song "Yesterday". Remarkably, no one knows the tune.  The black-out has erased the Beatles and all their songs from history.  Gradually, the musician discovers that he can reconstitute hits by the Beatles to win world-wide fame and fortune.  And, so, this is how he becomes an international pop sensation.  This situation (it's really not a narrative plot)is rife with potential, but the movie is too cautious and simple-minded to exploit the various aspects of this concept that present themselves.  Instead, the movie opts for the most uninteresting approach to the material -- everyone immediately recognizes that the Beatles' songs represent genius of the highest order and the hero becomes almost instantaneously famous.  But is this really plausible?  As I have argued elsewhere, success in music involves an enormous number of factors and, although Lennon and McCartney were undoubtedly geniuses of the highest order, there are a probably a thousand people with similar gifts languishing unknown today -- it takes luck, grit, exposure, and stage presence or charisma to create a pop sensation.  Therefore, it is certainly fascinating to consider that, perhaps, the Lennon - McCartney songs would have not succeeded without the boy-band success that the Beatles' initially garnered with their bubble-gum hits, weird but striking bangs, and their appeal to 13 year old girls.  Some great musicians remain unheard because they have no charisma, don't appeal to teenagers, and don't have any sort of physically distinguishing characteristics.  In fact, a large part of the Beatles' success was specifically cinematic -- the lads were put into movies by a film maker of genius himself, Richard Lester, and a large part of their success related to that successful (cinematic) marketing campaign.  Furthermore, the film's stance toward the popular arts is resolutely ahistorical.  Are we really sure that the Beatles' pastiches of British pub culture, their parodies of earlier songs and genres (for instance,"the Hollywood blues"), and, then, their development running concurrently with the expansion of psychedelics into youth culture would translate into this present moment in history?  The kids who are enamored with rap music are not likely, in my estimation, to admire something like "Ob la dee, Ob la dah" or reflective ballads like "In my Life"or "Long and winding road", songs that owe more to the crooner culture of Frank Sinatra than to Bo Diddley or Buddy Holly.  The Beatles' ouevre is now classic -- but it wasn't always classic; there was genuine perplexity about songs like "Revolution" and "Helter Skelter". The Beatles represent the crest of the post-War baby boomer influence on the popular arts and, although we think of their music as timeless, it isn't necessarily so -- their triumph looks obvious only in retrospect.  Accordingly, there's a biting satiric film lurking in the premise -- the idea that the success of the Beatles, in fact, might not necessarily be something that could be instantly replicated in this day and age.  And, in fact, the hero simply performs the songs like Lennon and McCartney -- it's as if the film has erased The Clash, the Sex Pistols, the later work of Bob Dylan and Neil Young as well as rap and hip-hop.  Wouldn't current  performances of Beatles' songs necessarily implicate influences occurring after their heyday?

There's a glimmer of a highly intelligent film on these subjects in the performances of SNL comic Katherine MacKinnon.  As a rapacious, steely agent, she dominates the latter half of the film and provides some relief from the picture's saccharine tendencies (which prevail in the end). MacKinnon looks like killer robot or some sort of bird of prey -- her eyes stab her victims.  She's the best thing in the movie, but a leading player in a much more interesting film that was never made. 

Yesterday contains some fine, nostalgic renditions of Beatles' songs and it's amusing.  There's a good scene when the hero visits  the elderly John Lennon, living in isolation in a picturesque home on the coast.  (There should be a moratorium on using isolated cottages on the sea-side as sets for reclusive geniuses -- every time I've seen the coast, it's all built up with condominiums and luxury hotels and no scenic cottages are anywhere in sight.)  The scene with the old Lennon, although sentimental, also belongs in a better, more interesting picture.  The movie stars Himesh Patel as the musician and was directed (colorlessly) by Danny Boyle.