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Film Review: Yesterday

‘Yesterday’ – Danny Boyle’s Sweet, Surreal Summer Fable about the Beatles

Imagine a world where no one has heard of the Beatles or tasted their music! Can such a drab, sad place exist? Oscar winner Danny Boyle’s film ‘Yesterday’ makes just such a startling premise and as one fan wrote on social media, it “has the potential to turn everything into an existential crisis.” Another mused, “If this parallel universe existed I would be distraught that the four never met and created something so beautiful and made a movement through music.”

 

Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is a struggling singer-songwriter in a small English seaside town whose career is going nowhere and his only fan seems to be his devoted childhood friend, chauffeur and manager Ellie (Lily James) who has loved him for as long as she can remember. Then Jack gets into a freak bus accident during a sudden global blackout.

When he comes to, he finds the whole world – except himself – has lost all memory of the Beatles. It is as if the Fab Four never existed – and only he remembers their songs.  Every song that Jack now sings draws huge crowds – he becomes an overnight sensation,  with all the trappings of fame, fortune – and a messed up moral compass.  This romantic comedy is also a cautionary tale about the important and often forgotten things in life, such as true love.

Every one of the Beatles lyrics is a salute to love – without these anthems the world would indeed be a colorless place. “Somebody said something about the number of times the word ‘love’ appears in The Beatles’ songs compared to the Bible,” Boyle observed. “By some extraordinary margin, The Beatles win hands down. I hope that’s what people will take out of this film: that it’s a love story.”

‘Yesterday’ makes you fall in love all over again – with the music and perhaps many younger filmgoers will be discovering the Beatles for the first time! As Boyle has mused about the Beatles phenomenon: “It shifted the world on its axis when the people were given the power of their instincts, about art, love and poetry. All those things that can be in those songs fundamentally changed the world to the force of movement…toward the teenager and the glory of pop sensibility. People decided to live. All because of these four guys.”

Listening to the lyrics of these powerful songs – an anthem to so many young people’s complicated lives you realize what the Beatles have given to the world.

The real stars of ‘Yesterday’ are of course the invisible, disappeared Beatles because without their music there would be movie!  But the movie also belongs to Himesh Patel, a wonderful, whimsical  talent who makes the story plausible, who makes us joyful and happy. He is the unlikely vehicle that carries the music of the Beatles to a world that knows nothing about them; a Google search for the Beatles by Jack reveals only beetle, the insect. When he tells people the song is by the Beatles, they go “Who?”

Himesh Patel plays Jack Malik with such a sincerity and vulnerability that you do care what happens to him – he is also every ordinary guy – so that in a way the film fulfils the fantasy of every young wanna-be who dreams of waking up a rock star.

Patel is not exactly an unknown for he is famous for ‘EastEnders’ which many of us in the US have not seen. What is remarkable is that he sings all the songs in the film from Yesterday to Hey Jude. There is no lip-syncing as in Bollywood movies! Yes, admittedly Patel is no Beatle and didn’t write the lyrics (!) but he sings them with so much feeling – I think the Beatles would have approved – and there may be a whole new career for him!

 

According to the production notes of the film, Patel had to not only study The Beatles’ songs on how to play them but also how to perform them for a huge crowd. “Learning the songs was a daunting prospect for me,” he says. “I had been teaching myself guitar for about 10 years, but there’s only so far you can get when you teach yourself.”

During the auditions, the filmmakers saw some very good actors who couldn’t sing and some very good singers who couldn’t act; Himesh Patel could do both and won the day. .

Himesh has received high praise from Danny Boyle who certainly knows a thing or two about discovering great talent.  Boyle says about the audition:  “He played ‘USSR’ on acoustic guitar, and it was one of those ‘bing!’ moments. As soon as he sang it, I knew. There were other more obvious candidates for the role, but I knew then, ‘That’s him.’ It was like I’d never heard that song, a song I loved, before. He’d taken it over. He was utterly respectful with The Beatles’ songs, and yet free with them as well. It wasn’t some karaoke version that tries to be clever. It felt like you were hearing the song afresh. There was something about Himesh that the songs just belonged to him.”

It’s noteworthy that the film has a brown hero who is still so much a part of the English landscape. There is certainly going to be a lot of excitement about the casting of Himesh Patel as Jack Malik. As one fan hyperventilated on social media, “An Indian dude is the face of a major film… I think my childhood dreams are coming true.”

The film has a very effective performance by Lily James as Allie, the tender school teacher who carries a torch for Jack who seems to have blinders on. She’s been his one-woman parade since high school and shows him all that is truly valuable in life

Kate McKinnon is the delicious embodiment of a greedy, evil Hollywood manager and brings a nice dose of robust villainy to the story. You also have the bonus of Ed Sheeran playing Ed Sheeran. And of course, all those Beatles songs.

‘Yesterday’ is a feel-good movie, a surreal fable about love and music and the utter importance of both in life.

The film is fun, a joy to watch – so don’t miss it. Usually at screenings of other films,  people start to get up and head to the exits as the end credits roll but here everyone seemed to be glued to their seats. They just kept sitting and watching – after all, who can leave when the Fab Four play?

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