Danny Boyle’s schmaltz-fest is all about musicians, and all of them are men. It’s another hero’s journey in which women are there to dote, scold and sell out
- Warning: this article contains spoilers for Yesterday and A Star Is Born
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.
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