Revue 'One to One: John & Yoko': Lennon and Ono, intimately

The challenge of the magnitude of the Beatles is that it is so universally supposed – and so implacally told – than nothing more to say on the subject. Even when a new fairly major work comes out, like the revealing documentary of Peter Jackson 2021 “Les Beatles: Recover”, “ A certain degree of cultural fatigue immediately undermines the excitement of images never seen before. With the legend of the Fab Four, permanently woven in the fabric of the company, what fresh land remains to be explored? (Not that it would never stop Hollywood: A Beatles biopics quartet is due in 2028.)

Kevin Macdonald has produced several documentaries on musical icons, in particular Bob Marley And Whitney Houston. But with “One to One: John & Yoko”, he does not just take an intriguing micro -shot of his subjects, concentrating on 18 crucial months in the life of John Lennon and Yoko Ono – he ignores the long shadow of the Beatles to watch Lennon independently of the group that made him famous. Targeting immersive immediacy, the Oscaritarian documentary of “One day in September” Try to get around nostalgia, pushing us back in the early 1970s after the group's breakup, while Lennon and Ono were in a small apartment by Greenwich Village, their creativity, their political activism and their romantic relationship in full bloom. It is a convincing and sometimes uneven attempt to bring the Beatles back to earth by illustrating the humanity of one of its members and the woman he adored.

Structured around the only complete concert that Lennon played after the dissolution of the Beatles, the documentary culminates with sequences from this performance show, called One to One, which took place on August 30, 1972, at Madison Square Garden. But Macdonald is after a simple concert film, allowing these musical interludes to counterpoint to a wider survey on the mentality of Lennon and Ono at a time of deep division within the American society. More specifically, “One to One” imagines how the abundant quantity of television that the couple has absorbed informed their vision of the country, the documentary often reversing the chains between advertisements, television games and reports on the Vietnam war and Watergate. Presented in IMAX, “One to One” overwhelms with this cascade of information, entertainment and consumerism, suggesting that the music and plea of ​​Lennon and Ono were born from this visual maelstrom.

To bring back the intimacy of the project, Macdonald will carefully recreate the couple's apartment in the couple, the camera sliding on the space while we hear archive telephone conversations. Fortunately, “One to One” never include Lennon and Ono Lookalikes, which makes the empty apartment simultaneously lived and ghostly. The approach testifies to MacDonald's global strategy, which avoids contemporary speaking heads or a lot of context on the screen for the film's vintage images. The film trusts that you know who segregationist George Wallace was, just as you can appreciate the joy of seeing a wonder of Stevie unidentified on stage with Lennon. Macdonald does not want us to be impressed by the story that takes place. On the contrary, it integrates us with the warm and relaxed disorder of the couple's domestic life, underlined the most fun by an apparently superfluous sub-contorting ono looking for how to obtain live flies for its last artistic installation.

“One to One” does not spend time restoring the professional strengths of Lennon of that time – how his solo album of spare, in 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” paved the way for the follow -up album “Imagine” about nine months later. Instead, Macdonald provides Lennon and Ono clips on talk shows chatting with their marriage or disparaging his former Beatles group comrades for not having defended Ono when the press disparaged him. The couple's daily concerns attract us, the fear of Lennon to be expelled as monumental as Ono's guard battle for her daughter Kyoko of a previous marriage. (Ono's difficulties inspired her 1969 song “Don't disturbing Kyoko”, which she offers with a blinding intensity during the One To One show.)

But the disturbing state of American politics is never far from their mind. Associating with the Rabble-Rouster-Rouser Jerry Rubin, Lennon and Ono talk about peace and love with naivety both poignant and inspiring. Many will be made of the modern relevance of the documentary – Nixon's reactionary right America looks like an act of opening for the cruel nation that we are now living – but there is a bruised challenge to Lennon's note that, although the dream of the power of the 1960s may have failed, a new movement could always arise in its wake. Lennon's indignation against the injustices he saw on television fueled protest songs like “Attica State” and “John Sinclair”, which then collected on the album “Some Time in New York City”, which fell two months before the concert of Madison Square Garden. Unfortunately, his humanism and his music were not enough to stop the crawling conservatism of America, but by positioning the passion of Lennon as powerful, “One to One” maintains that the message of the songwriter remains vital, even if his messenger is gone.

If low puffs of baby-boomer sentimentality are essential, “one by one” provides us at least versions of Barnburner live from “Gather yourself” and “Karma Instant!” This could make you ask you why the originals are not as fiery. That said, the film sometimes succumbs to the most tired tropes of the musical-doc genre. Macdonald's longtime employee, Sam Rice-Edwards, the editor-in-chief and co-director of the film, unimaginated concert performances with new images. (Nixon plans take place against Lennon to tear a blanket of “Hound Dog” say nothing of spectators either.) And although the idea that Lennon and Ono understand America through its television programming is provocative, too often, the collage of dark news and Glib announcements are leaning towards the finished irony.

More Macdonald resists mythology or summary, more John Lennon and Yoko Ono emerge as fragile and complex individuals in a trip together during uncertain moments. “One to One” is not a salvation of the brilliance of the Beatles or the genius of Lennon. Despite the big screens on which this film will play, the film makes its subjects as a large size of life.