Yesterday once more (for sure)

Okay wherehow does one really place Danny Boyles latest film Yesterday releasing in theatres this Friday That its nothing like Boyles previous works But his films have hardly ever been like each otherHow else does one explain Boyle following up on his phenomenal Oscar success with the sleeper blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire 2008mdashexpansively shot across Mumbai with multiple timelines and charactersmdashwith a movie like 127 Hours 2010 centered on one man trapped by a boulder in an isolated slot canyon all through the films running timeIn the incredibly incisive interviews book with Amy Raphael Boyle foretells that a filmmaker at the peak of his careerdefining output usually lasts at best a decade Boyle has himself been around for 25 years Shallow Grave 1994Trainspotting 1996 brought him instant globalcult fame What did we learn about Boyle through that film besides his deeply visual visceral understanding of Birminghams underground drugscene and a penchant to encapsulate local patoisThat he had an ear for music The Trainspotting soundtrackmdashwith its neatlydemarcated mix of classic 1970s pop Lou Reed Iggy Pop 1990s Britpop Blur Pulp and technodance perhaps precursor to EDM Bedrock Ice MCmdashremains still one of the greatest movie albums everWith Yesterday Boyle collaborates with screenwriter Richard Curtis How does one describe Kiwiborn Curtis in a sentence As the patron saint of modern romantic comedy Which is a fastdying genre Maybe because Curtis has exhausted his resources Or romancewise audiences have just become too cynical to be as welcoming of updated versions of Curtiss classics from the 1990s to the early 2000smdashright from Four Weddings And A Funeral 1994 Notting Hill 1999 to Bridget Joness Diary 2001 and Love Actually 2003Happy to take reccos but the last great HollywoodEnglish romcoms I can recall and for some reason both rather underrated would be Nancy Meyerss The Holiday 2006 and Marc Lawrences Music And Lyrics 2007 from over a decade agoThat said if we applied Artificial Intelligence to feed Boyle and Curtis into a system to generate a film whats it likely to look like Quite possibly Yesterday It is pretty much a romcom playing off a struggling singer hard on luck and his rookie manager who refuses to give up on himBeyond any of that though the film is essentially an excellent excuse to bring back The Beatles tracks and that you would immediately love if you were a fan And whos not a Beatles fan One could argue this is a lot like the recent Bohemian Rhapsody 2018 that more than a Freddy Mercury biopic basically brought together the Queens best tracks on the big screen But noYesterday is set in Suffolk in East England travelling through Liverpool and making it to Los Angeles This is quite in line with Boyles filmography that has never stationed itself in any part of the world for too long And yet his films manage to so brilliantly capture the vistas of faroff lands whether that be the Thai Koh Phi Phi island for the stunning thriller The Beach 2000 or the calmness of California in the dramatic Steve Jobs 2015Besides the obvious geography I suspect that as a filmmaker he also makes the effort to develop a greater understanding of the world he attempts to portray through his movies One of the remarks that surprised me coming from Boyle in Raphaels book was on the question of redtapism in India during their conversation on Slumdog MillionaireThe progressive interference of politicsgovernmentbureaucracy Boyle said was more a remnant of Soviet statism which India readily adopted going forward rather than simply the structures of British colonialism that it inherited after Independence Whether you agree or not this is astute observation for a Lancashireborn who had hardly if ever been to India before filming Slumdog in MumbaiIts probably the fact that he is simultaneously comfortable with multiple cultures that the hero of Yesterday is a browndesi dude debutant Himesh Patel who starred in the BBC soap opera East Enders with Indian parentage starring Sanjeev Bhaskar of The Kumars At No 42 fame and Meera Syal Sanjeevs grandmom on that same showForget that How do you place this film in the real world is what Im interested in For its a world of 2000 post Y2K midnight with people holding smartphones and posting pictures on Instagram where everything is as normal as it seemssounds Except The Beatles as a group has oddly disappeared from global public memory As has Coke the drink and Harry Potter and sundry else EhAs a fellow viewer told me at the films screening Imagine you wake up one morning and realise that ideas of liberalism equality empathy respect for multiple faiths etc just disappeared from the planet Okay that seems to be happening already Similar no But human history without The Beatles Man that sounds just as terribleMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the 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