John Lennon and Yoko Ono were looking for a refuge in New York. Then the city made them activists | Culture

Can you count something new about John Lennon in 2025, when 45 years have passed, but only if you have access to a mine: the material that treasures, and doses intelligencely, its widow Yoko Ono. Instead of drawing the nth biography of Liverpool’s musician, who opens this Tuesday in Spanish cinemas, he stops in a short period, 18 months between 1971 and 1973, and in one place: New York. Specifically, the modest apartment of the Greenwich Village that the couple shared when it fled the weight of fame in the United Kingdom and the legend of the Beatles, broken in 1970 with the most widespread story. This film works because many things happened in that year and a half, and because when they limit it, they leave out more bitter moments that came later. There are no better voices to tell them than their own, recorded then.

The film, then, has three hooks: telephone (unpublished) conversations, interviews and homemade movies (not so novel); A look attentive to the political context that caused the couple to turn to the pacifist militancy (and feminist, anti -racist and others); And, for the melómanos, the remastering sound of their famous performance (there were two sessions on the same day) in the Madison Square Garden on August 30, 1972. One of the few solo concerts of Lennon and the most memorable, which was published as a disc and video in 1986 with the name

Despite the absence of a narrator, the story built by the British director (One day in September, Whitney, Marley) It is conscientious. In a documentary scene, John confesses that what he likes to do most, since he has settled there, is to watch television with Yoko, both from the bed. “What do people talk about Friday?, What they have seen on TV on Thursday,” he says. So the footage stops in which television the couple watched: the programs, the news and even the ads. And through those cuts we understand the causes that made them mobilize. The Vietnam War (it was discussed if it was a genocide, does it sound familiar?), The arrest of young blacks for minor offenses (such as or the repression of mobilizations by President Richard Nixon, which also

At another time, Lennon talks to a collaborator on the phone and tells him that he knows that his conversations are being spying on him, so he will also record them to have a copy in case someone uses them against him. The film reproduces a multitude of dialogues among the English musician, the Japanese artist and different members of her team. Some inconsequential, but who point out features of their character, Guasón that of Lennon, more direct that of Ono. She is sincere on more than one occasion about her irritation for the witch label that had been placed and that had taken her to an unbearable harassment and threats in England. He also had a more personal motive to fight: he had lost contact with his daughter Kyoko, snatched by his American father in 1971, hidden a lot of time after a false name and who did not meet his mother

Other talks show Lennon’s ideas that did not come to fruition, such as the Free the People tour, which would raise funds to pay imprisoned bonds, and for which he wanted to recruit Bob Dylan (but he escaped). We also know people close to the couple at that time, from the poet to the activist at some point, Lennon goes from his participation in certain mobilizations, such as those who prepared against the Republican Convention, for fear that they derive in violence (which can be contradictory with which he supported, and

And the third ingredient of the film, but not the dominant, is music. There are some homemade recordings by John and Yoko rehearsing songs (such as Luck of the Irish) that we had already seen. There are also brief appearances of both in claiming acts.

The main course of the musical part is the concert of Madison Square Garden, which also arose from activism. A report had to suffer the boys with intellectual disabilities in the WillowBrook State School, in Staten Island, so John and Yoko’s performance, with the Elephant’s Memory band, would be beneficial to provide a background that would assure them with decent living conditions. The sound of that live has now been re -remembered by their son, (also musician, and also talented), and has considerable power. But as soon as a handful of songs are included, not all complete, so who waits for the entire concert has to look for the old DVD of Live in New York City Or wait, if there is luck, to be published by this improved version. In addition, the pieces performed by Yoko Ono that this did not want to include in the 1986 edition have been recovered.

The Lennon of the first half of the seventies was fruitful in the studio: he threw an album every year and from them came out songs as remembered as Imagine, Mother, Give Peace a Chance o Instant Karma! (We All Shine On); However, I barely stepped on the stages. The only other Lennon concert that was filmed was at the head of the plastic band (an impromptu superband with Ono and Eric Clapton), when the rupture of the Beatles was not yet official, and half of the themes were versions of classics of the classics of the classics of the rock and roll. His last appearance before a great audience was like for three songs, on November 28, 1974. There are no reasons for that racanería with the directs, nor for the album of this concert not to be launched in John’s life: we see it in good and comfortable form with its repertoire. He only resorts to a Beatles theme: Come Together.

Of what shows One to One On that year and a half it follows that John and Yoko were very close in their mission of awakening society against war, injustice and abuse of power. But there is no strictly intimate material of marriage, nor is anything mentioned about the state of its relationship. The story does not go beyond 1973, and there were weight reasons to stop there. In the middle of that year they left the Village apartment and settled with more luxury and square meters in the Dakota building, but in October Ono threw Lennon from home for his infidelity, his violent behavior and the abuse of alcohol and other drugs. It was the “long weekend”, which lasted another 18 months, during which John settled in California with May Pang, assistant to the couple and sent by Yoko to take care of him (on this he also called him to return with her in February 1975: the reconciliation was sealed with the birth of Sean nine months later and the prison He saw in public, until his reappearance with the album Double Fantasy In November 1980, weeks before he was killed at the door of his house by David Chapman.

How many films about each member of the Beatles are too many? The filmmaker Sam Mendes is producing, who will arrive in 2028. Paul McCartney also claims his post-benefit care Jet, Band on the Run o Live and Let Die. It recovers material published in its day with the same title with another unpublished, as a homemade performance to the guitar in its garden.

But McCartney and has also been very regular, so there are mountains of albums and videos of all its trajectory. Anything is more valued that Yoko Ono took out of a drawer on Lennon, who died at age 40 after a short race and with a long period at the end. This One to One It is more than justified, although small of the official and does not contain sensational revelations that could not be expected either.