One to One: John & Yoko
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“OK, so flower power didn’t work. So what? We start again.”
Overview
Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, Touching the Void) combines an intimate portrait of two people in love with rich archival footage in One to One: John & Yoko. In 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono have fallen in love with their their newly adopted home of New York City— while all around them the chaos of protests against the Vietnam War, political corruption and cultural upheaval. Macdonald places us fully in the world of Greenwich Village's hotbed of artistic discontent and offers rare insight into Yoko Ono's unique position, as a radical artist in her own right, viewed always as an outsider through the lens of her relationship with Lennon. The centrepiece of this immersive journey is beautifully restored footage of Lennon’s only full-length post-Beatles show, alongside Yoko: the “One to One” concert at Madison Square Garden to benefit the children of Staten Island’s Willowbrook institution. Vital, energetic and deeply moving, this performance shows the heart of this fascinating personal and artistic relationship.
“Not just an enormously moving historical portrait but a freshly relevant and cathartic one”
“A terrific documentary from start to finish, beautifully structured and by turns bracingly political, informative and inspiring”
“Both tender and galvanising...offering a fresh slant on a country’s upheaval and a generation’s countercultural awakening”
Why See This Film
What could there possibly be left to say about Lennon? Quite a lot, for someone willing to go beyond hagiographic legend. By showing the cultural context of this hyper-specific time and place Macdonald captures the nuances of John and Yoko as self-proclaimed radical artists who embody the contradictions of the postwar generational shift, torn between the drive towards political activism and a desire for self-exploration. There is no attempt here to present the pair as separate from their art or indeed from each other— if you've ever had the sense that Ono got a raw deal from fans and pop culture historians, One to One is an ultimate vindication of her as an artist and a romantic partner.
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