Venice Film Festival 2024 – One to One: John And Yoko ★★★

Released: TBC (UK)

Director: Kevin MacDonald

A Republican presidential candidate who the mainstream media wants to bring down but the public turn out in their thousands to see him at rallies. Race relations dominating the public discourse. Riots. People escaping reality with rampant consumerism and music.

No, not a comment on today’s news cycle but the backdrop for the only full length live concert John Lennon ever performed, after the breakup of the Beatles.

Directed by Kevin Macdonald whose previous music documentaries have spotlighted reggae star Bob Marley and Whitney Houston. The film focuses on a period in 1972 when Lennon and Ono were caught up in both personal and political turmoil, having moved from England to New York to try and live a ‘normal’ life.

The One to One concert was in aid of a Children’s Home for disabled children living in appalling conditions. Lennon and second wife Yoko Ono viewed a programme about the home on television and vowed to help after being moved by the children’s plight. The result was an organised day out for the children and a John Lennon concert for all.

The film features restored footage and previously unseen/unheard personal archives from the couple. Most interesting are the telephone conversations between John, Yoko and others. These tell the story in the couple’s own voices. The calls were recorded by them because they feared they were under surveillance and as John says in one call, they wanted their own recordings so they could counter what ‘they’ one day might accuse them of having said.

The calls give the film an intimacy that no amount of narration could give. They are a remarkable record of a time and place in cultural history. What comes across from them is how normal and down to earth both were. Especially Lennon. For a man who was practically worshipped by his fans and the subject of global adulation, he comes across as remarkably level headed.

In setting up the concert he showed, too, a certain humility in his own political journey. There was a recognition on his part that you can’t just seek to destroy ‘the system’ because you might find there is no easy replacement for it. So, all you can really be is the change itself, in your own small way and thereby help those you can easily reach rather than seeking to change the world.

The concert was a way of doing it. It’s a heartfelt, intense show, full of feeling and sincerity. While the timeless Imagine is captivating and his rendition of Hound Dog energetic, it’s his gut wrenching performance of his song Mother that steals the show. Like his choice of therapy, primal scream, the song comes from inside his very being. ‘Mother, you had me but I never had you.’ He sings it with such an urgency and so much longing it pierces your soul.

The documentary has also been described as a revisionist appraisal of the much maligned Yoko Ono as a creative force in her own right, who has been heavily misjudged over the years. She certainly comes over far better than one might expect, given the demonising of her over the decades yet her art remains very niche. Attempts to position her as on a par, creatively, with Lennon are over indulgent. However credible her observations about society’s treatment of women and the media’s treatment of her, in particular, she still comes across as someone determined to insert herself into every nook and cranny of Lennon’s life and history so that her name would become synonymous with his. In fairness, Lennon encouraged much of this and seemed in thrall to her to a degree that is hard to fully understand.

In recent years the documentaries screened at festivals have often been more impressive than many of the film features. While this isn’t as compelling as some others I’ve seen, at Venice, it’s an absorbing slice of recent cultural history seen through the lens of one of its most iconic figures.