Rent The Lost Weekend: A Love Story (2022)

Engaging and often moving documentary from May Pang - The Lost Weekend: A Love Story review by PD

Unfortunately, the usual version of events has made the ‘Lost Weekend’ of 1973-4 into a sort of blip in Lennon’s life, equivalent to some sort of one-night ‘fling’ with the secretary before resuming reality. This of course is a travesty of the truth.

The film is told entirely from May Pang's point of view and is a diary-like account of how her relationship with John played out week by week, emotion by emotion. On that score it does very well indeed, offering us a fascinating and often moving account of Lennon unmoored, trying to find himself in a world whose adulation he both courted and couldn't deal with. The film is also successful at revealing May's sincere love for John, and how they became convivial companions, their relationship rooted in a genuine mutual affection and in Lennon's discovery that he didn't have to live in a way that was always chained to his legend. There’s amazing archival material throughout, which gives us brief glimpses sense of what Lennon was like away from the limelight - including the dark side, which is very much in evidence. We hear for example Pang’s stories about how Lennon, in a drunken fit, smashed up their place in L.A., and how he would hit her sometimes (Lennon’s violent tendencies in general and against women in particular have generally been airbrushed out of his story after his murder). But according to Pang, the tales of Lennon’s misbehaviour were more the exception than the rule, and she accentuates all the positives - it’s no coincidence for example that during the period he was able to build a relationship with his son Julian, and also able to reconcile with Beatle Paul – it’s really moving to see the two former Beatles bury the acrimony and rediscover their friendship, even to the extent of being on the brink of working together again.

According to Pang, it was Yoko herself who deliberately set the whole thing up - having observed John’s infidelity, Yoko figured that she would let him stray with a woman she could control (even by her standards, a decision of seriously weird manipulation). However, Pang insists also that it wasn’t Yoko’s idea that the two of them move to L.A.; that, she claims, was an impulsive move on John’s part, who clearly had ‘serious’ feelings for her. And so began a distinctly odd three-way relationship, with Yoko attempting to manage it from a distance with persistent phone calls and May gradually being convinced that John wanted to be with her. The documentary chronicles how after about a year there (we often forget of course that this was no ‘weekend’), they returned to New York, moving into a small apartment, where they lived until the first months of 1975 and how they were talking of buying a house together in Montauk. But of course Yoko had never entirely been removed from the picture. There are many moments in the film when Yoko does not come off well — notably in Pang’s description of how Yoko attempted to cut off Lennon’s relationship with Julian, who is interviewed throughout the film; that Pang helped to bring John and Julian back together is obvious. But what doesn’t seem convincing is the final twist. After John goes back to Yoko, and Pang confronts him about it, he says, quite simply: ‘She’s letting me come back’. Letting him? That doesn’t square with what the film has implied — that Lennon had drifted away from Yoko; his comment suggests that their separation was always contingent on an understanding between them. But that’s something we’d have to guess at, and although May says that she and John kept seeing each other during what proved to be the last years of his life, we rather too suddenly skip to the fateful events of 1980, thus leaving many questions unanswered.

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel for May and what might have been, both for her and for the world. The film is no more than a slice of a bigger piece of history, but is a very engaging story of a truly remarkable, very likeable woman.