The premise of Yesterday should be intriguing: what would a world without the Beatles look like? Yet having set the question, director Danny Boyle and writer Richard Curtis don’t seem terribly interested in exploring its logic: if the Beatles had never existed, why are Oasis the only other band erased by this butterfly effect? Why do characters variously reference the Beach Boys and Coldplay, bands whose existence is contingent on that of the Beatles? Why does rabid fandom, ie the long-tail evolution of Beatlemania, remain intact?
It’s not that Boyle and Curtis are incapable of holding fast to a central concept: after all, Yesterday has no trouble committing to a world in which music by women doesn’t exist, and in which women themselves are only there to enable male musicians to live out their dreams.
When Jack (Himesh Patel) flings his records off his shelf in search of his Beatles LPs, which have vanished thanks to some strange calamity that has torn a Beatles-shaped hole in the cosmos, everything he pulls out is by male artists. As soon as Jack’s moon-eyed friend/devoted manager Ellie (Lily James) appears, it is thunderingly evident (to everyone but hapless Jack) that she is in love with him. He doesn’t love her and his original music is drivel. Yet this is a Richard Curtis film, and so her burden is to love and support him while waiting hopefully for him to notice her. Ellie’s trajectory is so predictable that you wonder if it’s a joke that’s going to pay off later on. It’s not, and it doesn’t. Yesterday is too mush-minded to attempt any narrative volte-face.
Yesterday works harder to posit Ed Sheeran – in a typically self-effacing cameo – as the only musician capable of holding a candle to the Beatles than it does to making its few female characters feel like real people, let alone artists themselves. (There’s also Jack’s manager Debra, played by saving grace Kate McKinnon, who is, quelle surprise, an unreasonable nightmare.) It sits at odds with the Beatles’ real-life legacy with women – a conflicted one, certainly, but also one that foregrounded the agency and achievements of Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney. Still, it is entirely in keeping with the recent spate of music movies and their treatment of female characters: as scolds, sellouts and bad mothers – morality tales drenched in running mascara.
Most of these women are fictional. (The exceptions offer moral instruction: Elton John’s mother gets a few barbed lines in Rocketman, telling him he’ll die alone. In Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie Mercury’s ex-fiance’s contentment serves as one of the film’s many indictments of Mercury’s “lifestyle choices”.) The biopic wave has not buoyed real-life female musicians; instead, female musicians on screen largely exist as a fictional axes for male auteurs to grind out their grievances about authenticity and fame.
There’s Ally (Lady Gaga) in A Star Is Born, her pop success driving Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) to his death; suggesting the demise of authenticity in an age where poptimism reigns. In Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, Celeste (Natalie Portman) survives a high-school shooting and becomes a teen star when her earnest song for her lost schoolmates blows up. Corbet misses the opportunity to interrogate America’s taste for trauma by depicting Celeste as a conduit for destruction: somehow, her losing her virginity seems to bring on 9/11, and terrorists commit an atrocity while wearing her trademark attire.
She is humbled by motherhood, as are Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss) in Alex Ross Perry’s gruelling and debasing Her Smell, and Rose-Lynn Harlan (Jessie Buckley) in Tom Harper’s Wild Rose. Even in Max Minghella’s forthcoming, relatively benign Teen Spirit, TV talent show hopeful Violet Valenski (Elle Fanning) is portrayed as an unstarry alternative to her brassier competition, disdain for pop slithering through a film that purports to celebrate it.
By comparison, Ellie’s fate in Yesterday seems like a happy ending – inevitably, Jack sees the error of his ways. But again, she’s a morality check: Jack abandons success and decides to pursue an authentic life of reasonable expectations in Lowestoft. She is, of course, delighted.
It is hard enough for real women in the music industry to be seen as autonomous without Hollywood undermining their efforts: minimising their presence, suggesting that female musicians are inherently inauthentic and incompatible with the demands of stardom, and that women in behind-the-scenes roles inevitably want to sleep with the male talent. Imagine there’s no women? We barely have to try.
