'Words & music
‘Marianne & Leonard’ a must for Cohen fans
The award-winning documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield has made films about everyone from serial killer Aileen Wuornos (“Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer” and “Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer”) to Margaret Thatcher (“Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher”).
In “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love,” Broomfield turns his eye to musician Leonard Cohen and his long
term, if frequently interrupted and serially unfaithful relationship with lover and muse Marianne Ihlen, a beautiful young mother from Oslo, Norway, whom Cohen met on the magical Greek island of Hydra in 1960.
Cohen, who was born and raised “an aristocratic Jew” in 1934 in Quebec, was still a writer in those days, working on his almost forgotten 1966 novel “Beautiful Losers” in a druggy haze in the Aegean sun. This was before his emergence as a folk singer-songwriter who would become famous for such woozy ballads as “So Long, Marianne,” “Suzanne,”
which became a hit for Judy Collins, who appears in the film, and the modern classic “Hallelujah,” a brooding anthem that has been covered by almost 200 singers in various languages.
Using archival footage, much of it of concerts, still photos, on-camera interviews and voice-overs, some of them by Marianne, Broomfield resurrects Cohen, who died in 2016 at age 82. Fans may not like the portrait they see of an obsessive ladies man, who toured and performed while on LSD and the Quaalude-like Mandrax, and had a lifelong penchant for gassing on about such things as romance and life in the self-anointed style of the rich and famous.
According to Cohen’s guitarist Ron Cornelius, Cohen was as vain as he was promiscuous. He suffered from severe depression and often booked the group, including backup singer and co-writer Jennifer Warnes, to perform at mental hospitals, perhaps because his beloved mother, Masha, once spent time in one.
The film acknowledges Cohen’s flirtation with Scientology and est (Erhard Training Seminars) and contains footage of Cohen’s time studying at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in the San Gabriel Mountains of Los Angeles. Cohen was ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1996. The film has little to say about Cohen’s relationship with Judaism, which according to one source was strong and never wavered.
While we hear about Cohen’s relationship with Canadian artist Suzanne Elrod, not much is said about the children he had with her (we hear much more about Marianne’s troubled son Axel). The same is true about Cohen’s romantic associations with French photographer Dominique Issermann and, later, actress Rebecca De Mornay. We are reminded that Cohen enjoyed a tremendous comeback from proverbial rags to riches later in life.
Broomfield arguably sentimentalizes Leonard and Marianne’s tie, perhaps because it gives the story a rosy, romantic tint. Nevertheless, Cohen fans will not want to miss seeing “Marianne & Leonard” for its insights into the artist’s work and the people in his life.
(“Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love” contains profanity, brief nudity and drug use references.)