I’d rather rewatch a bad film than a classic: The science behind our comfort movies

Chris Harvey has watched Richard Curtis’s mushy Beatles movie ‘Yesterday’ four times – but could only sit through Todd Field’s Oscar nominee ‘Tár’ once. He investigates what it is about certain films that keeps us coming back for more

Himesh Patel and Lily James in the compulsively watchable ‘Yesterday’ (Jonathan Prime/Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock)

See if you can spot a trend here. I have watched the film Yesterday four times, Citizen Kane twice, Rashomon once, La Règle du Jeu once, The Fifth Element maybe eight times, There Will Be Blood once, Beau Travail once, Persona once, Pitch Perfect too many times to count… and Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles? Never.

OK, so I’m a wannabe film snob refusing to face facts – I like trashy feelgood movies. Well, not exactly trashy, but… some of the films in that list are considered among the greatest ever made, and the ones I’ve watched on repeat aren’t. But I’m not having a guilty pleasures moment here, and I don’t need a psychologist to tell me I’m seeking comfort in things I already know. There’s something in each of those stories that I really like, something that is operating in the exact opposite way to, say, Todd Fields’s Tár, which was an early contender for film of the year when it came out in January. Great movie, I remember thinking, as I walked out of the cinema; I never want to see it again.

Take Yesterday. It’s a Richard Curtis/Danny Boyle collaboration, so it comes with serious populist credentials (before you peg me as a diehard Curtis fan, I should say I’ve never seen Love Actually, actually). Anyway, as you probably know, Yesterday is the story of a Lowestoft warehouse worker, Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), who dreams of making it as a singer-songwriter but is, sadly, awful, despite the enduring support and (unspoken) love of his schoolfriend-turned-manager Ellie (Lily James). Then Jack has a bike crash and wakes up in hospital in a world in which only he, it seems, has ever heard of The Beatles. And with that, a path to fame and fortune opens up before him, if only he can live with the knowledge that he is about to pass off the works of Lennon and McCartney as his own.

I love everything about the first half of this film. Jack innocently playing “Yesterday” to his friends on the guitar they bought him (“A great guitar requires a great song”) and their astonishment on hearing it (Ellie’s “Oh my… what… what the hell was that?”). Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar as Jack’s mum and dad, interrupting him as he tries to play “Let It Be” on the sitting room piano, with Syal improvising as she tells a neighbour it’s called “Leave It Be”, and Jack completely losing it with them. I love Ellie asking Jack, “How did I get in the friend/manager/roadie column instead of the ‘And I Love Her’ column?” I enjoy Ed Sheeran sending himself up as Salieri to Jack’s Mozart, and Joel Fry as Jack’s hapless roadie Rocky. 

It does, if I’m honest, get a bit mushy in the second half – it is Curtis after all – and I’m not sure, if I was in a similar scenario, whether I would be troubled by the urge to confess, which is the moral core, maybe even the point of, the film. Patel once told me he thought he would be compelled to confess, and that he couldn’t even bring himself to release an album on the back of the movie (although if he had to steal one Beatles song, he admitted, it would be “Blackbird”). But I think the secret of the film’s attraction is ancient: it’s basically the theft of fire from the gods. It appears in myths around the world, most famously that of Prometheus, who went on to develop serious liver problems for his trangression. What would you do with this gift, it asks. And would you be prepared to be punished for it?

I do have issues with Yesterday – it ignores most of The Beatles’ songs that all the cool kids like, such as “Rain”, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and “Dear Prudence”, while offering only passing nods to “A Day in the Life” and “Strawberry Fields”. But I don’t have to love everything about a story to watch, read or listen to it again. I love Pride and Prejudice, for instance, but I can’t be alone in finding its final 10 pages of happy-ever-afters a bit insipid after what came before them. Can I? 

What is true, though, is that Austen’s enduring popularity will carry her work into the future. Its new readers (and re-readers) are likely orders of magnitude greater than, say, those ploughing into Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and we can see in our own time how popular authors have staying power. Out of print is out of mind, for books and films. I’m not saying Yesterday is ever going to cruise into the greatest films of all time lists, but Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, an allegorical tale about a mistreated donkey, is still highly placed in them, as well as being a Metacritic Must-See, yet there can’t be that many film fans who would actually sit through the whole thing. I’ve tried. The mysterious quality that makes films rewatchable is the thing that critics’ lists never take account of, yet it’s the key to storytelling itself.

The ability of any form of narrative art to self-replicate over time relies on the same thing it did when stories were told orally around a fire – someone wants to hear it again. I’ve watched Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival loads of times now, and I love so many things about it, from its Jóhann Jóhannsson soundtrack to its riff on the non-zero-sum game. I could probably make a go of fitting its tale, of aliens trying to communicate with humans, into the idea that it locks into ancient myths about the circularity of time, but I’m not even going to try. I just love it. Plus, that theory is not going to work for Blow Up and Jaws and The Right Stuff and Blade Runner, all of which I’ve watched multiple times. I seriously admire Bergman’s Persona, too, you know, but once was enough.