Happy 10 years since ‘Let It Be’ was released! I wanted to do a thing to commemorate because this film means so much to me so here is my love letter to Let It Be.
mild spoilers ahead!
Where do I begin with Let It Be? I truly think this may be my favourite short film ever. It’s also the main reason I love short film as a medium so much.
Directed, written and produced by Bertie Gilbert, and starring Gilbert alongside Dodie Clark and Savannah Brown, Let it Be follows a newly broken-up couple and their dog named Ringo, who have the bombshell of a girl named Death (Savannah Brown) dropped on them, backdropped by the neverending debate of whether the early Beatles or the later Beatles were better.
I cannot believe that Bertie was 18 when he made this. It’s incredibly bold and existential for anyone of any age to make but it’s just so thoughtful and introspective. This also feels like where Bertie really found his feet with his style.
The Tom Rosenthal soundtrack is absolutely devastating. Tom Rosenthal as an artist has been making me so incredibly sad with his music since I was about 10. The hauntingly quiet piano of ‘All of Them Dreams’ over the climax gets me every time.
The colour grading is just beautiful. There’s something inherently warm about the yellow lighting but simultaneously it feels so bleak all at the same time which is utterly perfect. It’s sort of reminiscent of the glow of a sodium streetlight.
The humour is really good and achieves a lot of things. First, the levity works very well and definitely helps the film as a whole feeling less grim and bleak. Similarly, the humour stops it from taking itself too seriously. Also, it drives a contrast and makes the emotional scenes hit a lot harder when that humour is gone.
For this retrospective love letter, this is the first time I’ve watched this film with some actual knowledge of The Beatles other than surface level stuff and pop culture references, and it actually made this better as I was able to appreciate all the nuances a bit more. That’s not to say that you can’t take anything away from this without previous knowledge of The Beatles, this was still one of my favourite films ever even without knowing all (any) of the references.
However, even the character names of Martha (Dodie Clark) and Carl (Bertie Gilbert) are really fun little references.
I think it’s really interesting how Carl likes the later work and Martha likes the early work of The Beatles yet the title and what Martha plays for Death entirely revolves around Let it Be which was the last album and one of their last songs.
But also the significance of Let it Be as a song album and time period. It is such a good reflection for Martha and Carl against Lennon and McCartney. How one struggles to deal with conflict and something good ending and how the other seems indifferent. How a partnership was once “eyeball to eyeball” and how it’s now splintered and fractured. But even then, there’s a sort of love still there, still burning just enough for them to see out the end.
Despite that I am very much in favour of the concept of ‘death of the author’, I do have to agree with Bertie’s analysis/review taken from here that Let It Be is definitely the confrontation of life and death, how things change, and the inevitability of endings that happens in the step into the real world when approaching your early 20s. How we have to embrace and struggle against the impalpable sadness of finality. For me, these endings and the confrontation of life and death doesn’t always happen on the scale of magnitude that happens here: the life course shifts, sure, but these changes and endings don’t seem all encompassing and instead just a part of it all rather than seismic and life changing. It’s a weird one and I’m still trying to get my head around it all.
Endings have to exist for anything to mean anything. But, despite how it so often feels, an end isn’t always The End. And maybe I’m finally beginning to understand that.
Dear Bertie, thank you for making Let It Be. It has had a profound impact on me, more than I can quantify or put into words. You have genuinely sparked a lifelong passion within me with this film. Please keep making great things!
Let It Be can be watched here on Bertie Gilbert’s YouTube channel amongst his other incredible work.
Beyond The Fourth Wall 