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. And he means it. He delivers something quite different: an aestheticised scrapbook of 1960s’ agitation, filtered through the gaze of someone only superficially interested in the Beatles and their music revolution. The Romanian director indulges in a very personal type of nostalgia. On screen, an animated doodle dances atop grainy footage from newsreels, home movies, and amateur snapshots. This cartoon character is Ujică’s alter ego, scribbled into history like a cinematic watermark.

The director reminds the audience that this isn’t so much a film about the Liverpool lads as it is a movie 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 little effort to unpack the fan culture that elevated the Beatles into a myth. Ujică has limited concern for the collective pulse of the 1960s, and the screaming teenage girls packed against metal barriers, and the working-class fans.

Shot with meticulous precision, TWST – Things We Said Today boasts gorgeously restored black-and-white archival footage, lovingly framed and polished. Every still is a postcard, every composition calculated and smooth. Beneath the seductive surface lies an artistic vacuum. Style over substance. What is presented as universal cultural register is, in fact, a time capsule of white and middle-class privilege. Beatlemania is modelled into something neat, safe and digestible. Their art appears washed of politics, class struggle, and creative subversion. The director seems afraid of risk and rough edges. The visuals hint at brilliance, while the soundtrack hums conformity.

There is little political context, and crucially, no musicological substance. Ujica opts for cover versions instead of the real Beatles delivering their songs. Inadvertently, this strips the era of its revolutionary streak. The outcome is a film about the frenzy and electrifying energy of songs one never hears. What remains is a picturesque portfolio of middle-class pop culture.

The 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 to do anything in particular”, muses a voice in the film (the developments are voiced by multiple actors). That, ultimately, is the film’s ethos; a celebration of pleasure disguised as historical reflection.

TWST – Things We Said Today showed at Tiff Romania.