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Danny Boyle directs a screenplay by Richard Curtis about a songwriter who wakes up in a world without Beatles and can claim to have written his songs.

What would you do if you woke up one day and realized that you are the only one in the world who remembers Beatles songs? This is the kind of daydream that many of us have had, usually combined with the time travel – maybe you'd dribble past Pollock, defeat Agatha Christie against the mystery novel-novel or invent Twitter to have the power to ban racist world leaders from the service. If you were the scriptwriter Richard Curtis, however, and you found yourself in a world where the Fab Four never made music, your path would be clear: Somehow, rediscover these songs in a Hollywood romance that does not possess as the weakest connection with the phenomenon. of love as it is lived on the planet Earth.

A surprising match for the staging talents of Danny Boyle, who usually likes a little more advantage than what is found here, Curtis'. Yesterday tells the story of an unsuccessful singer / songwriter (Jack Malik of Himesh Patel) who becomes a world star when he "writes" songs like "Let it Be" and "Back in the USSR" "only to find his way to glory leading him away from the love of his life. Neither an unadorned pleasure like "She likes you" nor the White albumHis journey in mind, as his idea suggests, is more like a "Yellow Submarine" movie: pleasant and sometimes pleasant, but pretty darn stupid when you think about it.

We meet Jack as he paces the streets of Suffolk, constantly nibbling a song over the summer without the listeners feeling in the sun. Even when he wins a place in a big rock festival, the four or five faithful friends are almost the only adults in his tent.

A person like this would not seem to need a manager, but Jack has one: Ellie (Lily James), who guides him for occasional gigs and gives much needed supportive talk. Some badume that they are a couple, but they are not, and the viewer must draw the obvious conclusion: they're not together, that's because she's not do not like it as well. In the middle of the film, a dramatically clumsy scene will rely on our understanding of the opposite: she secretly sucked him, but Jack never thought of Ellie more than a sister.

This is not the bbad romance of film-romance, in which a duck is ugly until the leading man gets a charge of his makeover in the third act. Ellie is as beautiful and kind at the beginning of the film as in the end – in fact, all the more so as she firmly believes in Jack's questionable gifts. Never persuading us that this improbable dynamic is real, the film will only complicate things once Jack understands the mistake of his heart: Ellie utters an extremely foolish ultimatum and pushes it away.

But let's go back to the beginning. The night Jack finally decides to finally leave the music, a mysterious Y2K style event kills all the electricity on the planet for a moment. At the same moment, Jack is hit by a bus; when he wakes up at the hospital the next day, he will live in a world without Beatles.

The photo has fun with it, as you might expect: Jack is trying a new guitar by scratching the film's title track and plunging his friends in tears of surprise. When he begins to understand what has happened, he spends the afternoon googling the "Beatles" and finding nothing but hard-shelled insects. Rolling Stones, yes; Beach Boys and Bowie, always there. Oasis? What is it? you thought?

A tangent: Obviously, in a world without Beatles, Noel and Liam Gallagher would never have been successful. But Curtis only acknowledges, in the strangest way, that the world would be changed in another way. There is no Coca-Cola in this universe? OK, if you say so. But most of the rest of pop culture is as we know it. This is both a huge lack of imagination and a silent insult to the impact of the songs we are meant to honor here.

Realizing that he is the sole repository of the largest catalog of pop music, Jack uses it to rebuild everything that he can from memory. when he has trouble remembering a song, Boyle usefully turns the badly memorized lyrics into a stop-and-start musical video. When he finally recorded some of them and made them known to the world, the whole world realizes: Ed Sheeran settles near Jack's house and invites him to open for him on tour, where no one is about to star. (The real pop star quickly admits that Jack is the best songwriter and disappears in a terrible defeat, but does not qualify Sheeran from Salieri to a Lennon / McCartney Mozart guy overestimating Mr. In-Love-With -Ton's exploits. body?)

Trade calls. Kate McKinnon plays the most entertaining character of the movie, Debra, a music agent whose desire to hunt down Jack's talent SNL artist gifts perfectly. McKinnon resists himself a little, looking at Debra's new find in front, while retaining a list of ways he is defective as a potential pop icon. Despite everything, she takes her to Los Angeles for recording sessions, starting the machine to make the stars. For whatever reason, Jack accompanies his touring tour: Joel Fry's Rocky's rarely has much success as a comic relief, and if his name was supposed to trigger a "oh, I've forgotten that- the!" moment for Jack, the recording of "Rocky Raccoon" was not decisive.

Curtis' script avoids some disturbing questions (how can a possibly threatening stranger in Moscow connect to another weird spectator in Liverpool?) And chooses not to address philosophical issues that could spoil his enjoyment: N & # 39; Is not it possible that the Beatles' personalities have something to do with their success? These pop masterpieces would spark a very different reaction, perhaps even disappointed, if they were unveiled half a century after their writing. Instead, the film plunges into thwarted love tricks and a secondary plot about Jack's consciousness, a device that begins in a promising way but reaches an incredible climax.

Patel is friendly in the lead and occasional Beatles fans will enjoy his many songs recomposed by Jack. But it's odd to see how the arrangements of the movie play with these robust songs. The only performance that really stretches is that of "Help!" In which Jack, almost desperate in his life off the stage at that time, begins to break hard enough, he seems to need some help. The scene suggests two directions Yesterday could have been spent, instead of building the kind of tiring and forced romantic gesture that would not be satisfactory, even if a supernatural power outage made the whole world forget about every move in the rom-com game book.

Location: Tribeca Film Festival (Gala)
Production Company: Working Title
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Casting: Himesh Patel, Joel Fry, Lily James, Ed Sheeran, Kate McKinnon
Director: Danny Boyle
Writer: Richard Curtis
Producers: Danny Boyle, Richard Curtis, Bernard Bellew, James Wilkinson, Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan
Executive Producers: Liza Chasin, Nick Brazier, Nick Angel
Director of Photography: Christopher Ross
Production Designer: Patrick Rolfe
Costume Designer: Liza Bracey
Publisher: Jon Harris
Composer: Daniel Pemberton
Casting Director: Gail Stevens

PG-13, 116 minutes

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