One To One: John and Yoko

From its very title (kept unchanged for the Italian release), "One to One: John & Yoko" makes clear its nature as a film about a couple, and about one couple in particular: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, whose two halves are placed on equal footing, with the latter never reduced to a mere bystander or an appendage of the former. That's no small thing, given the personalities involved and the fact that Yoko Ono has often been accused of being one of the main causes of the Beatles' breakup, thus bearing the stigma of someone allegedly destroying (a man and his successful career) rather than building (first the couple, then the family).

We're at the start of the 1970s, and with the echo of those accusations still lingering, John Lennon and Yoko Ono move from England to New York, to Greenwich Village, becoming reference points for the counterculture. Standing alongside them are, above all, Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin, with whom the couple organizes events, fundraisers and concerts, all united by a common thread of criticism against the establishment (at the time represented chiefly by President Nixon) and against the Vietnam War. With Rubin, the activist who had been one of the "Chicago 7", the relationship would break down a few years later, over disagreements about the use of violence at protests, which Lennon and Ono absolutely opposed.

Kevin Macdonald's film thus focuses on a specific period, the first half of the 1970s (and specifically from late '71 to early '73), setting itself apart from the Scottish director's previous music documentaries, "Marley" and "Whitney", which had taken a comprehensive approach to the life, career and death of two icons of modern music (Bob Marley and Whitney Houston, respectively). Here, instead, a limited timeframe is chosen and the focus stays fixed on it, leaving the past aside and barely hinting at the future: the Beatles are mentioned only in passing on a handful of occasions, and there's no discussion, except indirectly, of Lennon's death, even though the documentary closes with the couple's move from Greenwich Village to New York's Upper West Side, into the Dakota Building where the English singer would be murdered.

For this reason, "One to One: John & Yoko", although a film about the couple, cannot be considered a biographical film about the couple, given that it doesn't dwell on – and in fact doesn't even mention – key moments such as how they met, fell in love, and got married. It is, then, more than anything, a work about that couple's role within the context of post-'68 activist ferment, as seems confirmed by the fact that it entirely omits the period following the birth of their son Sean (1975), when Lennon and Ono would drift away from political activism.

Pinpointing the chronological setting in the early 1970s is, moreover, important, because it's a phase in which the counterculture movement was on the wane. The glories of '68 were already a distant memory, and that peak moment represented by Woodstock (August 1969) had been followed by the stain of Altamont (December 1969), the concert organized by the Stones that would be remembered chiefly for the death of young Meredith Hunter, stabbed by a member of the Hells Angels, who had been unwisely enlisted to handle security for the event.

The silent majority that at the end of 1968 had handed the presidency to Richard Nixon was growing ever more intolerant of the counterculture and its supposed excesses, as emerges in several parts of the documentary where Macdonald interviews passersby or simply lingers on their expressions, at times betraying a thinly veiled disgust. In short, flower power had failed, but there were still those who thought they could try again, as Lennon himself explicitly acknowledges at certain points.

Alongside the usual archival footage, the director quite frequently has us listen to phone calls, not accompanied by images but simply by a transcription of the words. These are mostly Lennon's calls, and in one of them he explains that he started recording them out of fear of being wiretapped by the FBI (a suspicion fueled by the strange noises actually audible during the calls, later duly confirmed). We're in a very specific period of American history, after all, one in which political paranoia had returned in force: while McCarthyism was by then a distant memory on one hand (and indeed the film touches on the return to the United States, after some twenty years, of Charlie Chaplin, whose visa had been revoked in 1952), on the other hand, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers (JFK in particular), those same feelings had resurfaced, and would be confirmed by the Watergate affair (1972), which would lead to Nixon's resignation (1974). The very persecution of Lennon carried out by the federal government, which was moving to deport the singer by exploiting an old marijuana possession conviction in England, is in fact emblematic of a new climate of hostility and oppression, similar to that of McCarthyism. A revival of unpleasant situations from the past, whose paradoxical nature is underscored by the director precisely through the contrast between Chaplin's return and the start of deportation proceedings against Lennon.

From a technical and stylistic standpoint, the peculiarity of a source (the phone recording) that shifts from being a mere tool or device to taking on genuine diegetic weight is certainly one of the most interesting theoretical hallmarks of a director who has always been attentive to the questions raised by non-fiction cinema (and yet his genes might have suggested a leaning toward fiction, given that he is the grandson of the great Emeric Pressburger).

Striking, though far from original, is also the decision to faithfully reproduce John and Yoko's apartment in the Village, a choice that evokes at once – and in some ways in conflicting fashion – a museum-like approach and a more fetishistic one.

In that small apartment, a television set placed at the foot of the bed where John and Yoko spent much of their time stood out: it was their "window on the world", allowing the couple to stay up to date with current events, and it's how they discovered situations such as that of the Willowbrook State School, an institution for children with psychiatric disabilities that Lennon and Ono would decide to support by putting together the "One To One" concert that gives the film its title, and of which extensive excerpts are shown.

But TV is also the medium that was beginning to dominate an era, in all its sheer variety, and it becomes central to the film thanks to the choice to give ample space to that footage – whether commercials, newscasts or variety shows – in a kind of long, engaging channel-surf.

Even though it's a work made on commission (the project was entrusted to Macdonald by producers Peter Worsley and Alice Webb, both very active in the field of music documentaries, later joined by Brad Pitt's Plan B and by Macdonald himself), the director still manages to bring his own spirit to the project, crafting a work with its own distinct narrative and stylistic identity, even within territory already covered by earlier non-fiction works (Lennon's time in New York is recounted in detail, among others, by the documentaries "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" by John Scheinfeld and David Leaf, from 2006, and "LennoNYC" by Michael Epstein, from 2010, in which, however, Yoko Ono's role is decidedly secondary – starting, not by chance, with her absence from the title).

Finally, it's worth noting that editor Sam Rice-Edwards is credited as co-director, underscoring the importance of editing in works of this kind, all the more so here given the choice to show extensive glimpses of period television to better contextualize the historical moment.

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