‘One To One: John And Yoko’: Venice Review

Dir. Kevin Macdonald. US/UK, 2024. 100mins.

It’s hard to top Get Back, Peter Jackson’s extensive, magnificently-remastered shot-for-a-doc footage of the Beatles in the studio and on a rooftop in Soho in 1970. One To One: John And Yoko tracks what happens next. It’s late 1971 now, and Lennon and Ono have decamped to a Greenwich Village apartment in New York City. Kevin Macdonald’s clips-only/fans-especially doc is loosely framed around a benefit concert (the One to One gig) which Lennon gave, and which proved to be his last live show.

 Interesting and provocative and streamer-friendly

Made in co-operation with the Lennon Estate, for better and for worse, One To One is preoccupied with the American zeitgeist which hit the couple when they arrived – and how they plugged into it. They were already activists, the Amsterdam bed-in long behind them, and Macdonald posits that Lennon and Ono tuned to the times via a TV set in their apartment, stunned by the possibilities of multi-channel news. Coming exactly a year after Macdonald’s John Galiano documentary, One To One will benefit from a similar Venice/Telluride springboard into commercial life, and seems like a natural streamer prospect.

Recordings of voice messages and TV shows featuring a palpably more happy and relaxed John and Yoko are used as a navigation tool for the turbulent United States of America, as Nixon goes for his second term and the anti-war and -racism protests continue to combust. Lennon and Ono jumped into it all, seemingly on a whim. They were incredibly sincere in their activism, but it wasn’t very focused. Macdonald adds archival footage, music clips, taped voice calls and random TV adverts from the time, at time turning One To One into a noisy spaghetti junction.

The director recreates the interior of the small apartment at 105 Bank Street, and the TV set which buzzes Allen Ginsberg, the voluble Jerry Rubin, the obsessive AJ Weberman, every pink Chevrolet ad and chat-show host of the early 1970s. Clips of Lennon and Ono show a couple entirely ad odds with the druggy slowness of Get Back:  Lennon is his ‘own man’; Ono comes out from under the hair curtain of Get Back to be more assertive.

This clippy, trippy film is very much in Macdonald’s skillset. The rhythms are intentionally jarring, to mirror the frenetic energies of 1971-73. There’s no scene-setting or particular timeline. Jolty TV ads jostle up against subtitled audio footage from telephone recordings Lennon made at a time when he was certain he was being tapped. The One To One concert at Madison Square Garden is only part of a ferment which includes Nixon and bloody footage of the wounded in Vietnam; the deaths at Attica State prison and the campaign to release John Sinclair; AJ Weberman rootling through Bob Dylan’s bins; two full-throated Yoko Ono songs, in full; and a running gag about flies.

It’s possible that in the age of Tik Tok a film like this has met its match. Macdonald and co-director/editor Sam Rice-Edwards have assembled 100 bustling minutes which add up to an impression that never punches home. While it’s a remarkable feat, particularly from an editing perspective, there’s also something laboratory-like about raiding the archive from a distance and imposing such an articficial structure on it. There’s also a troubling question of independence.

By the time the film comes to an end, Lennon was about to set off on his 18-month ‘lost weekend’ with May Pang (already Ono’s assistant), although you’d never guess it here. There’s talk of Yoko’s absent daughter and the arrival of Sean, but no mention of Julian. But to make any of the strands here into something more you’d have to risk the film and the archival material that has been made available to the production. Sean Lennon Ono is managing the music, which is presumably part of the reason why we get the privilege of watching a healthy, happy John sing ’Instant Karma’ and ‘Imagine’ – but it comes at a price.

Macdonald is a prolific and accomplished director. Here he’s working with Plan B; on last year’s Galiano: High And Low, he worked with Conde Nast. That was a portrait of a fallen angel, a different kind of film and a more successful attempt to look at the truth of a man through his own words. One To One is interesting and provocative and streamer-friendly, but an assemblage all the same; you poke at the foundations a little, and it risks collapse. Those times, though, they certainly were a-crazy.