Marianne and Leonard: Phrases of Love, 2019, 1 hour 42 minutes.
Directed by Nick Broomfield.
“Dearest Marianne,” Leonard Cohen writes to Marianne as she’s dying in a hospital mattress, “I’m just a bit behind you, shut sufficient to take your hand.” And so begins the elegiac and hauntingly stunning 2019 documentary, Marianne and Leonard: Phrases of Love. The movie is a jagged kind of love story about Leonard and his Norwegian muse. As a result of Broomfield was Marianne Ihlen’s lifelong buddy (and he provides, her lover on Hydra) the documentary is a magical reminiscence tour that features private archival movie, photographs, and voiceovers of Marianne, Leonard, and the director too.
Like a Harold Pinter play that begins on the finish of the story and strikes backwards in time, Marianne and Leonard transits from Marianne’s hospital room in Oslo in 2016 to the bohemian playland of Hydra within the ’60s. Then it was doable to dwell on lower than a thousand {dollars} a yr. The island grew to become a magnet for actual bohos — writers, artists, and poets who have been drawn to a speciously easy existence the place donkeys have been (and nonetheless are) the native mode of transportation. Towards a backdrop of whitewashed dwellings and cerulean blue sky and sea, the movie recounts how ex-pat life was an extended occasion of swapped companions, medicine, and dinners of fresh-caught fish and some too many glasses of Ouzo. The artists, as artists are apt to do, feasted on each other and the youth and fantastic thing about their muses. Therefore, there have been casualties: uncared for youngsters, overdoses, damaged hearts that didn’t heal, suicides.
CREDIT: Roadside Points of interest
Marianne and Leonard is an exceedingly intimate movie. It’s like a Leonard Cohen track — he makes a window into our soul — and shares his soul with us too. The movie features a treasure trove of unique footage from the interval Leonard calls his “previous life.” We see him in virile bare-chested prime. We watch Marianne dive off a ship or standing like a bronzed goddess, staring out at Homer’s wine darkish sea. We see her son “Little” Axel (named after his father Axel, Marianne’s husband). We’re instructed Little Axel went to India, took too many medicine, and subsequently was institutionalized for the rest of his life. Current of their absence are folks in Leonard’s life that we don’t hear from, one more reminder that we’re aware about solely a part of the story. Suzanne Elrod, the mom of Leonard’s two youngsters, doesn’t seem, nor do Adam and Lorca themselves. In a candid interview with Aviva Layton, ex-wife of well-known Canadian poet Irving Layton (and Leonard’s good buddy), we study that Suzanne flew to Hydra to evict Marianne and Little Axel from the Cohen abode. He had let Marianne keep on after the affair was over.
The movie double underscores that Marianne was Leonard’s best muse. That’s, earlier than she was discarded within the title of artwork. Earlier than Leonard’s fame took him up, up and away. Of all of the artists on Hydra within the heady ’60s, it was Leonard who grew to become a form of cult god himself, ascending to musical Mount Olympus. Adored by followers, the guru-poet-Zen monk sang his life in poetic story-songs with melodies typically inflected by mandolin modes influenced by his Judaic upbringing and his mom’s Russian heritage. In his 80s, Cohen toured the world giving live shows to legions of followers who laughed and cried, just like the lyrics in his track, and cheered him on with adoration. In later life, Leonard traveled in type between gigs with a personal jet and entourage of 59. He earned upwards of 14 million {dollars} a yr. A goosebump making second within the movie is watching Marianne’s face as she sits entrance row at a live performance whereas he sings her track. Together with the remainder of the viewers, who like most of his followers know the lyrics by coronary heart, she sings the refrain to “So lengthy, Marianne.”
CREDIT: Roadside Footage
However earlier than he was our Leonard Cohen, the movie reminds us he was Marianne’s lover. He was an impoverished Canadian poet, albeit from an prosperous Montreal household. He drank an excessive amount of, took pace and typed three good pages a day, and Marianne introduced him a sandwich for lunch. Maybe Marianne was too nourishing and supportive, because the movie suggests — a form of martyr-muse. She recollects, “I used to be his Greek muse who sat at his ft.” Certainly, the muses with endurance are elusive and simply past arm’s size out of attain, a glimpse away.
Each Leonard and Marianne’s voiceovers run all through the movie, as if they’re sharing one thing treasured of their previous and turning the pages of an previous picture album only for us. Leonard says, “What I cherished in my previous life, I haven’t forgotten.” Marianne by no means forgot him, and the movie tells us she had “the compartment of her coronary heart that was all the time married to Leonard.” For these of us who love his music, we’ll always remember him. He sang his pleasure and ache and we weren’t alone. He’ll all the time be our Leonard Cohen.
