John and Yoko. Greenwich Village. Tv. Activism. Vietnam. Richard Nixon. Bugs. Peace. This skittish, channel-surfing archival documentary, co-directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards, touches on all of this and extra. But it surely lingers on nothing. It’s a spry, fleet-footed movie that makes an intriguingly angular and jittery companion piece to Peter Jackson’s weighty collection The Beatles: Get Again, which explored, over practically eight exhaustive hours, the making of the Beatles’ 1970 closing album, Let It Be.
One to One, in distinction, covers an 18-month interval shortly afterwards. It’s 1971. Unshackled from the Beatles and burned by the hostility of the British press, Lennon and Ono have upped sticks and moved to a bohemian two-room condo in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The John Lennon we see in Jackson’s movie could be abrasive, a guarded presence. In One to One, he’s lighter: engaged, curious and open, he appears positively chipper in some archival snippets. Ono, in the meantime, is reframed from the Beatles-wrecking succubus of in style media opinion on the time and proven as an articulate, if eccentric avant-garde artist who’s candid concerning the private value of the hate marketing campaign levelled towards her. The transfer to New York is not only a relocation, but additionally, because the movie tells it, a rebirth of types.
Nicely, that’s the authorized narrative, at the very least. The movie, which was made with assist (and, one suspects, a substantial diploma of oversight) from the Lennon property, advantages from some terribly revealing and intimate materials, comparable to recordings of phone conversations (Lennon believed they had been being bugged and reasoned that he would possibly as effectively be taping his cellphone calls if any person else was already doing so). Footage threaded via this nonlinear collage movie from the One to One live performance at Madison Sq. Backyard in 1972 – Lennon’s final full-length stage efficiency – is electrifying, notably a barnstorming rendition of Come Collectively. But it surely’s additionally notable and considerably irritating {that a} veil is discreetly drawn over sure features of the Lennon-Ono relationship. There’s no indication, for instance, that the tip of the interval that the movie covers coincided with the short-term breakdown of their marriage, and Lennon’s affair with Could Pang.
Collectively together with his co-director, Macdonald, whose earlier forays into biographical documentary embrace Marley (2012), Whitney (2018) and, most lately, Excessive & Low: John Galliano (2023), adopts a intentionally jarring and scattershot strategy right here. It’s an image about John and Yoko, actually, however it’s as a lot concerning the turbulent time and place through which they discovered themselves. On this, there’s a transparent parallel with Todd Haynes’s thrilling, febrile documentary The Velvet Underground, which prolonged its attain past the band to discover the broader cultural New York panorama. With One to One, the film-makers take as a jumping-off level a throwaway remark from Lennon about his appreciation of tv. “It’s changed the hearth,” he says, describing it as a “window on the world”. A recreation of the condo they shared reveals an enormous tv looming over the mattress. And lower along with the glimpses of Lennon and Ono, from interviews with journalists, audio recordings, residence movies and reside performances, is a barrage of ragged clips ripped from American tv of the period.
A few of it ties into the life the couple carved out for themselves in Manhattan: we see firebrand activist Jerry Rubin emptying each barrels throughout a late-night chatshow. And Rubin, along with fellow rock stars of the countercultural motion comparable to Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg, was a part of the circle inside which Lennon and Ono moved. Elsewhere, the movie skims via fragments of gameshows and commercials – Cadillacs draped in bikini-clad showgirls, every little thing that the red-blooded all-American man may need in life – and delivers a skittering sensory assault of attention-grabbing headlines snatched from the rolling information protection. We see Nixon, together with his pinched, thin-lipped, mendacity smile. Shell-shocked reporters reeling from the Attica jail riot. The bruising horrors of Vietnam. Excessive and low tradition, information and present affairs: all of it, the movie suggests, mainlined by John and Yoko.
At instances, the enhancing and far-ranging archival attain put me in thoughts of final 12 months’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat by Johan Grimonprez, one other documentary that weaves collectively music and politics to exhilarating impact. If One to One lacks a few of the elegant mental rigour of Grimonprez’s image, I think it’s no accident. For John and Yoko, accustomed to British TV’s sedate three channels, the brash noise and broad horizons of US tv should have felt like a step into the wild west. The movie’s rattling tempo and haphazard focus replicate the couple’s voracious, if at instances unfocused urge for food for concepts and points.
Launched from his Beatles tasks, Lennon apparently made the a lot of the newfound freedom. The joy and enthusiasm in his voice as he bounces concepts for music and activism throughout a cellphone name is infectious and important. In the end, One to One may not reveal an enormous quantity that’s new about Lennon, however it makes him really feel bracingly alive in a method few different documentaries have managed.
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