The Lost Weekend: A Love Story
Directed by Stuart Samuels, Eve Brandstein, and Richard Kaufman
Featuring May Pang, John Lennon, Julian Lennon, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Elton John
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Now available to watch on the Icon Film Channel, and Blu-ray, DVD & Digital December 18th
by Megan Robinson, Staff Writer
The entertainment industry will chew you up and spit you out without a second thought. A fresh new face can walk in the offices of a larger than life record company, lie through her teeth, and get a job as a typing, filing, handling the phones—a job which can quickly become assistant to the most famous couple in the world. But it all begins and ends in the same way: a bright flash, so instantaneous and ephemeral. For May Pang, her job quickly evolved into an affair that, in her words, was orchestrated by Yoko Ono, pursued by John Lennon, and blossomed into real, honest love. Now, she’s going against the grain of this industry that saw her as a shiny new toy and telling her side of the story from beginning to tragic end.
The Lost Weekend: A Love Story combines Pang’s narration with archival footage, photographs, and recordings, as well as interviews with various confidants who witnessed the affair, to paint the whole picture. It’s a bit one-sided; after all, this is Pang’s version of her life from childhood to the end of her time working with Lennon and Ono. Pang does, however, paint a more reverent portrait of Lennon than expected, and a much more manipulative one of Ono. According to Pang, it’s completely true that Ono would have Pang reject calls from Julian Lennon and that, throughout the affair, Ono called incessantly, interrupting her time in Los Angeles with Lennon as he jammed with fellow big-name artists like Harry Nilsson and Elton John. To many, especially the more brash as detailed by Lindsay Zoladaz in Vulture, she’s “the woman who broke up the Beatles.” In The Lost Weekend, she’s the woman who broke up John Lennon and May Pang. For Pang, Lennon is the star, much like in Ono’s own life, as Zoladz writes “They would, of course, see only the towering, superior Him — what could he have possibly seen in Her?”
It’s not like her perspective is hard to understand. With one word from Ono, Lennon was back to his life in New York, whisked away from Pang in her eyes. A kind of anger or resentment feels entirely natural once Pang makes clear how much she truly misses Lennon, only finding out about his death from the television. Pang admires Ono and Lennon as a team, especially with their political activism that enraged the White House, right up until love enters the mix. Can you blame her? Maybe not. It doesn’t make the sequence in which archival footage shows Pang telling talk show host after talk show host that Ono orchestrated the affair, as intense strings underline her words intercut with pictures of Ono that turn from black and white to blood red as if she’s a demon, any different than the mass media backlash Ono has gotten since she became “the woman who won’t let the boys have their fun,” as Zoladz writes.
Pang asks, simply, that you understand her perspective. She is not always the most gifted narrator, as her delivery can be stiff, but she has the most wild stories and plenty of proof to back it up. However, her story is so intertwined with being Lennon’s girlfriend that it can be hard to get more of a sense of her as a person, while we instead learn more and more about the ex-Beatle. Every story of the Lennon father-son duo reconnecting in Disneyland or Lennon being followed by the FBI of the Nixon administration is interesting, but they don’t give as much insight into Pang as one would hope. It’s clear she’s a compassionate and kind woman, as was able to successfully reunite father and son, if for a short time, and stay friends with Cynthia and Julian Lennon. She has a creative drive, loving every minute of jamming with giants in the music industry and acting as a production assistant on avant-garde films. But everything comes back to that singular Him — not Jesus, but someone who said he was close. He’s not perfect, battling alcoholism and even physically abusing Pang, but she can’t help but dwell on what could’ve been.
The most captivating piece of the portrait The Lost Weekend paints is in its visual storytelling, marrying the rich history of its subjects with beautiful animation by Eddie Wieseman and Gary Keenan that brings Lennon’s famous doodle style to life. Doodles of Pang and Lennon falling in love, kissing as he moves her hair behind her ear, for example, illustrate the kind of love they had: a loose, imperfect fairy tale. One was shown to Pang, an unintentionally eerie imagination of Lennon “floating peacefully through old age, potbellied and content, surrounded by his favorite things,” including Pang, skinny and nude, above him. Pair these drawings from Lennon that are brought to life with demos and recordings of the singer, and you’re instantly transported to that lost weekend.
For a fan of Lennon, the music of the time, or the era of the early 1970s, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story is a fascinating documentary that illuminates a blip in the life of a young woman who was thrust into the industry, and subsequently the spotlight, practically overnight. The stories Pang tells are engaging, featuring a cavalcade of the most famous people of the era, like Mick Jagger and Elton John. It does not, however, provide the same detail for Pang, obscuring her more and more to tell us, at all times, how Lennon felt, what Lennon did, who Lennon spoke to. These are her experiences, too, but it does feel like more introspective material might have ended up on the cutting-room floor.