Tribeca 2022: "The Lost Weekend: A Love Story"

by Jason Adams

Time is a funny thing, slippery. An elastic band behind our eyes that can stretch as far back as we can remember before snapping us back to here and now -- sometimes gentle, sometimes with centrifugal violence like a start. There's no logic to what lingers longer than it lasted, and to what whooshes by -- the best moments a single glance etched in stone, while the worst nightly nestled beside us. To John Lennon his eighteen month romance with his personal assistant May Pang circa a 1973 split with Yoko Ono he called it "a lost weekend" -- meanwhile for Peng here she is fifty years later recounting the experience for the documentary called The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, premiering this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival.

That slippery sense of time weaves its way through directors Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman, and Stuart Samuels' fascinating ninety-seven-minute doc...

The film balloons Peng and Lennon's whirlwind love affair up to epic proportions. Which admittedly isn't exactly a reach when we're talking about one quarter (some would say the most important quarter) of the most important rock-and-roll band of all time. When the two were photographed together at their first public event (by the world's most notorious paparazzo Ron Galella no less) it made headlines. Every day of that eighteen months seems like it was another adventure -- she witnessed the song "Imagine" being born; Peng got to watch Lennon reunite in a recording studio to perform for the very last time with Paul McCartney (oh and Stevie Wonder was on drums, because why not).

Indeed her stories read like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz -- "And you were there, and you were there," where the "you"'s in question are Mick Jagger and Elton John. For Beatles fans this stuff will serve an indelible window into this period in Lennon's life -- I mean Peng took the photo of John Lennon signing the document that formally dissolved The Beatles at last. And at Disney World, no less!

Still it's hard not to watch the doc without a nagging feeling nipping at our heels that we're not getting an entirely accurate, which is to say balanced, portrayal of these eighteen months, since it sticks a little too hard by my estimation to Peng's starry-eyed perspective. While I thought we'd left the demonization of Yoko Ono as "band killing witch" to history's ash-heap at this point in time, the way she's framed by The Lost Weekend we all but see her riding in on a broomstick every time she comes up. Peng maintains that Ono herself instigated the affair between the two, and we have no reason not to believe her -- Ono's very clearly a complicated person and the relationship between her and Lennon was, let's say, fraught. Especially in this period of time.

But the absence of Lennon's voice, and his questionable intentions during this time, is a big one that we actively feel watching the film. There are lots of clips of him talking but nothing explicitly about May, and his brutal ending of his time together with Peng -- he simply left, walked in the other direction calling that way "home" -- all paint the picture of a selfish, callous man given permission to temporarily sow some oats. One who had no intentions of doing anything but breaking this young girl's heart. And it feels that the whole way through. And it's hard to get too swept up in the romance Peng's reminiscing of in turn, when to me I was just watching a wreck coming in slow motion. But then those destinations, the places where we are standing glancing back, they do tend to fall away when the individual steps we took to get to them each shine so bright.

Comments

[thevoid99]

I am interested in that period of Lennon's life though I'm not really sure if I want to know about his time with May Pang. I'm more interested about that reunion he did with Paul McCartney and how it lead to the two talking again as friends. I'm pretty sure if Lennon was never killed by that asshole Mark David Chapman. There would've been a Beatles reunion eventually but I think it would've lead to John and Paul just playing together again.

If the narrative the film play into that narrative of Yoko breaking up the Beatles. I will not watch that as I'm tired of that narrative as I think it's bullshit. Plus, it was Allen Klein that really drove a wedge with the Beatles.