A Filipina singer with heart in ‘Yellow Rose’ Sean Ono Lennon on remixing father’s music: It was therapy SPOTLIGHT
“I’m illegal,” says Rosario “Rose” Garcia (Eva Noblezada), a Filipina living undocumented in Texas, in Diane Paragas’ “Yellow Rose.” The way she says it is meant, as it is, to sound ridiculous. Here is a bright, headstrong young woman, dressed in jeans and a cowboy hat. She’s about the furthest thing possible from a criminal. She’s a picture of Americana.
Unrequited love has taken many forms in the movies, but in “Yellow Rose,” devotion is denied by a country. Rose, 17, lives with her widowed mother, Priscilla (Princess Punzalan), at the motel where she works as a cleaner. On the night when Rose and a guitar-shop friend Elliot (Liam Booth) sneak into Austin to see Dale Watson (playing himself) perform at the Broken Spoke dance hall, Priscilla is taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, imprisoned and soon deported to Manila. Rose narrowly escapes the ICE raid, and is left distraught and alone. She improvises a life of her own in Texas, a plight coinciding with her awakening as a country musician.
The contrasts of “Yellow Rose” are stark. It’s part a “Star Is Born”-styled coming-ofage tale, part immigrant nightmare. That makes for an often moving, sometimes clunky take on the modern American musical, where an aspiring, hugely talented singer making her way through boozy bars needs sanctuary as much as she does a big break. The script can be too heightened and prone to leaps of coincidence, and details are sometimes lacking. But the heart of “Yellow Rose” is true, a testament to Noblezada’s strong presence and her ability to belt the film’s original songs.
Sean Ono Lennon’s first experience reworking his father’s catalog was terrifying and intimidating, but he had two main goals in mind to keep him on track: Preserve his father’s message in the songs and help the
late icon’s music reach a younger audience.
On Friday, which would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday, “GIMME SOME TRUTH. THE ULTIMATE MIXES” was released and includes 36 tracks hand-picked by Yoko Ono and Sean Ono Lennon, who serve as executive producer and producer on the project. The duo worked closely with engineer and mixer Paul Hicks to maintain the essence of the songs, which were completely remixed.
Ono Lennon, who shares the same birthday as his father and turned 45 on Friday, came out stronger at the end of the at-times heavy process.
“I knew that it was going to be kind of introspective for me, obviously. I was scared going into it to be honest. I had a fear of messing everything up or not being helpful
or it being too emotionally difficult to just listen to my dad’s voice over and over again,” Ono Lennon said. “Especially ‘Double Fantasy,’ it triggers a whole period of my childhood that was tough because that’s when he died. I had a lot of resistance working on that record actually.”
“Ultimately it was very healing. It was like therapy. It was very therapeutic in the end. I’m very glad that I got to do it. I would not have revisited those songs on ‘Double Fantasy’ without having this project. It turned out to be kind of a cathartic thing.”
“GIMME SOME TRUTH. THE ULTIMATE MIXES” includes Lennon’s postBeatles songs, from “Imagine” to “Woman” to “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” and it will be released digitally, on CD and on vinyl.