John and Yoko. Greenwich Village. Television. Activism. Vietnam. Richard Nixon. Insects. Peace. This skittish, channel-surfing archival documentary, co-directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards, touches on all of this and more. But it lingers on nothing. It’s a spry, fleet-footed film that makes an intriguingly angular and jittery companion piece to Peter Jackson’s weighty series The Beatles: Get Back, which explored, over nearly eight exhaustive hours, the making of the Beatles’ 1970 final album, Let It Be.
One to One, in contrast, covers an 18-month period shortly afterwards. It’s 1971. Unshackled from the Beatles and burned by the hostility of the British press, Lennon and Ono have upped sticks and moved to a bohemian two-room apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The John Lennon we see in Jackson’s film can be abrasive, a guarded presence. In One to One, he’s lighter: engaged, curious and open, he seems positively chipper in some archival snippets. Ono, meanwhile, is reframed from the Beatles-wrecking succubus of popular media opinion at the time and shown as an articulate, if eccentric avant-garde artist who is candid about the personal cost of the hate campaign levelled against her. The move to New York is not just a relocation, but also, as the film tells it, a rebirth of sorts.
