Leonard cohen muse marianne ihlen9/27/2023 Music, it was now clear, would be his career, and Marianne would fade into the backdrop while her ex-boyfriend embarked on a long hedonistic odyssey, chalking up all the conquests he could manage after emerging as a celebrated musical figure. It was Collins, of course, who first recorded Cohen’s “Suzanne” in 1966, while his first album followed the next year. As Cohen himself explains it in an old interview, “I was always escaping, I was always trying to get away.” A lively Judy Collins is a key witness here to Cohen’s transition from failed novelist to celebrated singer-songwriter, recalling his low opinion of his own voice and petrifying fear of performing, including one night when he fled the stage and would only return if Collins accompanied him. and into the arms of many, many other women. To be sure, theirs was a great love story, but Cohen’s interest turned to music, which led him to the U.S. Youthful seeker Cohen, a well-raised lad from Montreal, was on an extended trip through Europe in 1960 when he met the Norwegian beauty on the Greek island of Hydra, known as a quiet enclave for international artists and, increasingly, druggies.Ībundant film footage of the couple, Marianne’s young son Axel and the paradisiacal environment leave no question as to why the place captivated seekers, and there are amusing shots of Cohen, sitting shirtless in the burning sun and allegedly on amphetamines, struggling to write a big novel, Beautiful Losers, which flopped on its publication in 1966. Still, it’s a welcome addition to the bulging collection of films about the allure and the treacherous downside of the counterculture era. The doc swells with wonderful archival footage that immerses you in the hedonistic environment the principals occupied, but in ranging wide it somehow doesn’t go deep, or at least deep enough, into its twin protagonists to satisfy as the full story. Veteran British documentary director Nick Broomfield, who counts among his many films the music-centric Kurt & Courtney, Biggie & Tupac and Whitney: Can I Be Me?, certainly knows of what he speaks (he himself was briefly one of Marianne’s lovers). A twisty network of amorous, creative and, at this point, historical impulses drive Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, an odd duck of a documentary that delves knowingly into intimate aspects of the relationship between American musician Leonard Cohen and his 1960s lover and muse Marianne Ihlen, but only intermittently gets to the bottom of things.
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