The afternoon of the day he was killed in 1980, John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, sat for a radio interview at their apartment in the Dakota in New York. The ostensible subject was their new album, Double Fantasy, but the conversation was expansive. It included reflections on how they met, their artistic temperaments, and their feelings about their lives together and parenthood.
The audio recording forms the spine of “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” a documentary by Steven Soderbergh selected for Cannes’s Special Screenings section. Soderbergh told Deadline that he had to abridge the interview for running-time purposes but nevertheless preserved its chronology and flow.
Although the reporters speaking to Lennon and Ono were told that questions about the Beatles were off-limits, Lennon doesn’t seem to have been shy about the subject. He describes Paul McCartney as the only Beatle he picked as his partner (George came through Paul and Ringo came through George); how his experiments with “freaky music” worked their way into songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” (apparently a night of playing with tapes and making sounds marked a pivotal step in his and Ono’s courtship); and how he had lived the boyhood dream of being Elvis, a stage he sounds eager to move past. He explains the difference between composing on assignment—not his preferred mode—and genuine inspiration.
Most of the discussion is accompanied by conventional archival footage. Soderbergh also shot a group interview with the three still-starstruck reporters—Laurie Kaye, Ron Hummel, and Dave Sholin—who were there asking the questions. These talking-head interludes are perfunctory, but their trio’s recollections set the scene well. Among other details, we learn that care was taken to use a special audio setup involving chromium dioxide tape so as to be minimally disruptive, since the three of them were intruding in Lennon and Ono’s home.
The twist is that Soderbergh, in collaboration with the film’s presenter and “technology partner” Meta, has used A.I.-generated imagery to accompany passages in which Lennon and Ono turned philosophical, meaning that there weren’t obvious photographs or clips that could be wedded to their words.
Soderbergh has taken to calling the resulting imagery “thematic surrealism,” which seems like an intellectualized way of saying that the art created with A.I. almost invariably looks bogus and wrong. Whether Lennon and Ono’s deeply personal musings really needed to be accompanied by such patently inhuman imagery as a baby walking through a misty hallway or a caveman winking by a fire is, perhaps, the subject for a very short debate. But “John Lennon: The Last Interview” is far from the first documentary to have the problem of needing to match pictures to dialogue. It may be the first to solve that problem by resorting to technologically trendy clip art.
By contrast, the minimalist Argentine director Lisandro Alonso’s “La Libertad Doble” (in Directors’ Fortnight) has a bracing commitment to the real. (Indeed, it opens with a shot of an actual man at a campfire, eating meat with a knife.) In outline, the film is both a follow-up to and a rethinking of Alonso’s first feature, “La Libertad” (2001). But Alonso noted at the Q&A that relatively few people saw that film (myself included—my first Alonso was “Los Muertos” from 2004), and that he felt “La Libertad Doble” could be watched as a standalone work.
Like “La Libertad,” “La Libertad Doble” focuses on Misael Saavedra, a woodcutter in Argentina’s La Pampa province who plays a version of himself. If the actress Tao Okamoto in “All of a Sudden” stole the festival a couple of days ago simply by delivering a lecture at a white board, Misael (character, actor, or perhaps both) achieves a similar feat: There’s something disarmingly peaceful about a watching a lone man in a Mets hat saw branches at great length. Alonso’s careful attention to duration, framing, and especially sound transform the mundane into the sublime.
The way Alonso attunes viewers to Misael’s routine also turns out to serve a dramatic purpose. We learn that Misael has a sister, Micaela (Catalina Saavedra, who, despite her last name, is not related to Misael in real life), who has spent most of her life in asylums and may have a habit of wandering off. The rural center where she is living now is closing because of a lack of funds and discharging all its patients, regardless of their treatment regimens. That leaves Micaela with no alternative but to join Misael in his largely solitary lifestyle in nature. (One of the film’s small laughs occurs when Misael is told that Micaela likes to water plants. “Are there plants where you are going?” he is asked.)
From this appalling situation, Alonso shows two siblings finding their element together: Misael gently corrects Micaela on types of birds. She learns the pleasures of interacting with moss and sunlight. Without much fuss, Misael accommodates Micaela in what little space he has. (She takes his bed in his hut; he opts for a sleeping bag outdoors.) Wind, light, and—toward the end—a bit of mystery help make “La Libertad Doble” one of the festival’s loveliest films.
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