I still remember driving through the hills and dales of the English countryside listening to Hard Day’s Night in the family rental car. Back then I had a haircut that could best be described as a mop top. And then during my one visit to Liverpool, I was beyond ecstatic. I’m a fairly reserved person and yet standing in Paul McCartney’s kitchen at 20 Forthlin Road (his childhood residence) what else could I do but bend down and kiss the floor?

So you see, Living is Easy resonates with me a great deal. I’ve had similar feelings, similar joys and epiphanies listening to the Beatles. Even as I have matured and branched out in musical taste there’s no doubt that the Beatles will always be a part of my cultural heartbeat. When I was younger I would say that I idolized them and as I’ve grown older those feelings continually evolved.

That’s why sometimes our hopes are dashed and our heroes fall off their pedestals. We get so close to them — feel like me know them so well — without ever having met them or interacted with them. But they don’t know us and they can’t know us in the same way.

No superstar, musician, actor or athlete can hold up to the kind of scrutiny that we put to their lives. So maybe this is an utterly ludicrous fantasy, a dream wrapped up underneath the unassuming folds of a Spanish comedy-drama. But David Trueba’s film is the perfect summation of our pursuits in life. Going after the long shots just for the sheer invigorating fun of it. For Antonio (Javier Camara) that means meeting John Lennon. For others, probably someone else. It’s no different. I still wouldn’t mind meeting Paul McCartney someday. That’s the point. We can dream and pursue big things.

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, especially the way Antonio goes about it. He practically is an enigma within the culture he lives in, repressed, fearful and stiff as it is. He breaks all those molds, teaching English with enthusiasm, using the Beatles’ lyrics (most memorably “Help”) as a didactic tool to get his little pupils to think beyond the nominal.

His journey, to find John Lennon in the rural town of Almeria during the filming of Richard Lester’s How I Won the War in 1966, is an inspired heroes journey and the beauty of this story is that he doesn’t go it alone. In fact, being the personable, talkative and genuinely fun-loving man that he is, he welcomes others into his adventure. Belen is a woman struggling to figure her life out as she tries to hide the fact that she’s well along 3 months pregnant with nowhere to turn. Juanjo sports a mop top rather like the one I used to have, except in this case his father doesn’t approve. The familial tension is too much for him and he skips out, looking for something different.

These are the crossroads at which they end up riding down winding coastal roads as Antonio slowly puts them at ease with his charms — and an unfathomable enthusiasm for the Beatles. The following interludes of Living is Easy are better seen than explained because they generally unfold with the clarity and everyday delights of real life. And in this case, the Fifth Beatle gets his happy ending. He was rewarded for the disarmingly audacious way he chose to live.

Admittedly, I probably don’t hold up nearly as well against the fandom of Antonio, but if nothing else, I admire the Beatles for their lyricism and the pure, revolutionary nature of their music. I never grow sick of it. And like a great many of us out in the audience, I hope to live out these kinds of adventures with the people I meet along the way. To badly paraphrase Tennyson, it’s better to say you tried and failed than to never have tried at all. Because you never know, you just might get lucky.

For all those who don’t know, the film’s title derives from Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a very personal song in its own right. However, as I scanned the backlogs of my mind, I thought to myself, of all the options, what an odd song to choose. But, in truth, it fits perfectly with the themes of this magical mystery tour. An evocative song for a deeply heartfelt film.

4/5 Stars