After its big screen premiere last summer, it reached Movistar+ an essential documentary for lovers of music, history and pop culture of the 20th century: ‘One to one: John & Yoko’, which immerses the viewer in a … of the most intense and revealing periods of the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
The film starts from a historical moment: the Individual benefit concert, held August 30, 1972 at Madison Square Garden in New York, organized by the couple after being horrified by seeing on television the inhumane conditions to which children at the Willowbrook children’s psychiatric institution were subjected. It was the only full concert that Lennon gave after the dissolution of the Beatles.
Through immersive narration, the documentary goes back eighteen months since the concert to explore the time when the couple had just settled in the United States, share a small apartment in Greenwich Villagewatching television obsessively (thanks to this, they were able to keep up with current events in Willowbrook) and rethink their political and artistic activism.
The film, directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards, combines never-before-seen archival material – home movies, private phone recordings and meticulous reconstructions of the New York apartment – with images of the era’s televised pop culture: from The Price is Right and The Waltons, to Coca-Cola commercials, the Vietnam War and Nixon’s speeches.
The film reveals how Lennon’s traumatic childhood and Yoko’s feelings of guilt shaped his activism and art.
All of this creates an immersive and deeply personal atmosphere in a complex and laborious piece that “only fully crystallized during the final edit” as we are told. the film’s producer, Peter Worsley (“Not Just a Girl,” “Eric Clapton: Through 24 Nights”). “We took a long time in this process, forty-six weeks, which was decisive for the film to reveal itself in this last phase. We had the time and resources to make it enjoyable. As a producer, the hardest part is always development: getting the rights, creative team and financing together to be ready at the same time. If all of this is coordinated and organized correctly, production can be fun!
John, feminist expelled by feminists
Beyond the concert itself, the documentary reveals “other sides of John and Yoko,” says Worsley. “For example, Yoko’s search for her daughter Kyoko and how this influenced his art and music, but also the delicacy of his performance on the song “Looking Over from My Hotel Window”. And the humility of John, for example, when, alone present, agreed to be expelled from the first international feminist conference“.
The film analyzes in detail the most radical aspects of the activism of the era, with figures like the writer Alan Jules Weberman, who even accused Bob Dylan of “selling out to the system” by investing in an office building. “But we also show the other side of activism, the more sympathetic side,” replies Worsley. » Weberman is a very unreliable witness to this activism. And in the documentary, we see opposing examples, such as the appearance of Jerry Rubin during the John Sinclair concert, for publicly demand that we leave Dylan alone since it is he who “formed our conscience“, revealing these excessive demands for purity.”
The producer regrets that Lennon’s spying is not “among the declassified FBI documents”.
John and Yoko balanced on that fine line that separates activism from radicalism, two pop idols who also had to endure harassment by the secret services on the one hand (“unfortunately, the documents on Lennon are not part of the FBI documents that Trump declassified”, laments the producer), and criticism for his extreme wealth in a world full of injustices. “John suffered less from it than Yoko, at least at that time,” says Worsley. “From the way John spoke about Tittenhurst, the mansion where he lived in England, I get the impression that he was comfortable with contradiction, something Yoko, who was born into a wealthy family, was not comfortable with.”
The Japanese artist probably did not feel morally qualified to speak about poverty, but John did so because he had experienced it. And according to the producer of the documentary, there are other reasons that explain the origin of his aversion to authority and why his revolutionary desire ended up transforming into a kind of anxiety. “He felt like he had to do something more constantly, and I think that anxiety goes back to his childhood,” Worsley concludes. “Frejected by his mother, he had an absent fatherthen his mother reappeared in his life at 14, introduced him to music and bought him a guitar, before being murdered at 16 when she was knocked down by a drunk off-duty police officer. Isn’t it all there?
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