Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love

Synopsis: The story of the enduring love between Leonard Cohen and his muse, Marianne Ihlen.

No self-respecting Leonard Cohen fan will want to miss Nick Broomfield’s informative and insightful look at the iconic singer/songwriter’s career as seen through the alembic of his relationship with Marianne Ihlen, the subject of one of Cohen’s best-known songs, ‘So Long Marianne’. The title of that song very much sums up the narrative trajectory of the film which traces their relationship from the mid-1960s on the Greek island of Hydra (pronounced hee-dra), where they met, to her deathbed in 2016 in Norway, where she died three months before Cohen himself.

Broomfield assembles an impressive array of archival material some of which has already been seen in the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen but most of which will be new to viewers. This ranges from clips from home movies of his salad days with Marianne on Hydra to concert and backstage footage from the 1960s to his final tours in the 2010s. Whilst Broomfield’s proclivity for inserting himself into his documentary feels a little self-serving (he informs us that he too was Marianne’s lover) by and large the talking head interviews and his use of audio recordings by Ihlen and Cohen builds an insightful portrait of one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century,

The image Broomfield gives us of Cohen isn’t exactly flattering but rather reveals him to be emotionally chronically self-centered, ready to take but not to give in love. That Cohen made this shortcoming the subject material of many classic songs and so fueled his tendencies even further is ironic but this appears to have been the operating mechanism of his genius – the ability to transmute the raw stuff of his experience into artistic gold. One of the most eye-opening aspects of the film is the insight it provides of the casualties of these experiences, from Marianne herself, forever in love with Leonard but doomed to endure his insatiable desire for other women to the many casualties of the drug-fueled, free lovin’, unreasonably optimistic but for many tragic ‘60s. The account of the copious drug use of the time, including by Cohen himself, and its toll is quite revealing. Fortunately for us it seems that, unlike many of his peers, he was quite good at self-discipline, a quality that no doubt stood him in good stead for his six year mid-career retirement to a Buddhist monastery.

As the film draws to a close we join Ihlen beside her death-bed as a close friend reads an email to her from Cohen, himself in the last months of his remarkable life.  It is an extraordinary moment and the love the two have for each other is palpable.

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