Andrei Ujica reminisces Beatlemania as a lovingly crafted photo album that leaves out some crucial parts
Don’t be fooled by the title or the subject matter: Andrei Ujică’s latest film is not a documentary about pop music. “It simply doesn’t interest me as a genre,” the Romanian director bluntly declares about his feature. And he means it. What he does deliver is something quite different: an aestheticised scrapbook of 1960s hysteria, filtered through the gaze of someone only cursory interested in the Beatles and sonic revolution. The Romanian director tends to indulge a personal and arguably bourgeois form of nostalgia. On screen, an animated doodle dances atop grainy footage from newsreels, home movies, and amateur snapshots. This cartoon character is clearly Ujică’s alter ego, scribbled into history like a cinematic watermark.
It’s reminding the audience that this isn’t so much a film about the Beatles as it is a film about Andrei Ujică thinking about the Beatles. The animated alter ego skips, waves, and muses through history like a ghost haunting an era he never truly interrogates. There is hardly any effort to unpack the fan culture that elevated the Beatles into myth. Ujică has little concern for the collective pulse of the 1960s. Certainly not for the screaming teenage girls packed against metal barriers. Nor the working-class fans who turned the Beatles into global icons. This way, the film ends up historically and intellectually anaemic. For all its visual polish, it lacks sociological insight.
There is little political context, and crucially, no musicological substance. Emblematic for these gaps is the soundtrack. Ujică swaps out the band’s music for budget cover versions. Presumably, this happens to avoid paying royalties. Inadvertently, this strips the era of its revolutionary sound. The result is jarring: a film about the frenzy and electrifying energy of songs one never hears. What remains is a picturesque portfolio of middle-class pop culture. Shot with meticulous precision, the film boasts gorgeously restored black-and-white archival footage, obsessively framed and lovingly polished. Every frame is a postcard, every composition is structured and smooth. Beneath the seductive surface lies an artistic vacuum. It’s all style, with little substance.
Devoid of the messy spirit of its subject matter, this vinyl-wrapped memory palace feels lifeless. What’s presented as universal cultural memory is, in fact, a time capsule of white, middle-class privilege. The fanaticism of Beatlemania is modelled into something neat, safe, and digestible. Their art appears washed clean of politics, class struggle, and creative subversion. While offering little more than a pleasant reverie, the film implies its own supposed historical importance. Ujică boldly aims to remix history and his decorative dreaming up of “Yesterday” makes for some appealing escapism. But this is curatorship for the complacent that seems afraid of risk and rough edges. The visuals hint at brilliance while the soundtrack hums conformity.
What could have been a sensorial riot becomes a museum piece. Pleasing, mute, and too disconnected from the noise that made the Beatles relevant. “One great thing about summer is not having to be anywhere or do anything in particular,” muses a voice in Ujică’s patchwork collage. That, ultimately, is the film’s ethos; a celebration of privilege disguised as historical reflection. This isn’t the social political artifact it strives to be. It’s more a lazy summer afternoon diversion than documentary cinema: hermetically sealed and scrubbed clean of any creative daring, social political unrest, or real cultural analysis. The Beatles changed the world. Ujică simply reminisces about watching.
- OT: TWST – Things We Said Today
- Director: Andrei Ujica
- Year: 2024
