“So Long, Marianne,” heard regularly on FM in the 1970s, became one of Leonard Cohen’s most familiar songs. The subject of the lyric was real. Marianne Ihlen was Cohen’s lover and muse in the ’60s after they met on the Greek island of Hydra, where he lived half of each year. The documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love pages through the formative first chapter of Cohen’s long vocation as the troubadour of souls seeking the palace of wisdom along the road of excess.
Director Nick Broomfield plays a supporting role in the story. Part of the small party of expatriates on Hydra, he was also Marianne’s lover in that set’s loose configuration of lives. Like Cohen, he remained friends with her. Still photographs, home movies and other footage of Hydra reveal a rocky vista of whitewashed, close-packed towns capped by the Byzantine domes of tiny Greek Orthodox churches. The locals cast a tolerant eye on the artistic expats who found freedom in the bright Mediterranean sunlight to paint, sculpt, write and make love. The powdery feel of dry seawater on stone surfaces, the warm silken wind bearing the aroma of fresh-baked bread are evoked as paradise.
Marianne & Leonard is a visual and aural mosaic of memories and archival voices. Already enjoying modest acclaim as a poet in his Canadian homeland, Cohen composed his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers on Hydra in between swimming, sex, all-night conversations over retsina at the taverna and LSD-laced excursions across the island’s mythic landscape. The novel’s failure to find an audience led him to songwriting and—as recalled by his musical mentor, Judy Collins—a reluctant pivot to performing. According to her, Cohen was nearly paralyzed by stage fright when she introduced him at a New York folk festival.
The documentary also reveals a good deal about Ihlen but, face it, Cohen was the star and she was, for millions of listeners, an image in a song. The film includes Cohen’s own late-life musings on his wandering past as they relate to Ihlen and Hydra: “Even if the situation looked good, I had to escape.” He realized, “It was a selfish life”—that romance of artist and muse, a towering trope of 20th century modernism, as was the evanescent illusion of free love.
Marianne & Leonard includes Cohen’s 2016 voice message to Ihlen when he learned she was succumbing to leukemia. “Endless love and gratitude,” he said. Cohen survived her only a short time, dying three months later after completing a final world tour as the grey eminence of intimacy guarded by poetry.
