Film review: Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen: the love affair of a lifetime
Just before her death in July 2016 of leukaemia, a friend of hers, Jan
Christian Mollestad, contacted Cohen, who sent an email to his former lover,
which Mollestad read out to Ihlen. It said:
Dearest Marianne,
I’m just a little
behind you, close enough to take your hand. This old body has given up, just as
yours has too, and the eviction notice is on its way any day now.
“I’ve never forgotten
your love and your beauty. But you know that. I don’t have to say any more.
Safe travels old friend. See you down the road. Love and gratitude. Leonard
Four months later,
Cohen died after a fall at his home in Los Angeles.
In November 2016, the
singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, renowned for his plaintive ballads, died a few
months after the woman who inspired many of them, his Norwegian lover and
muse, Marianne Ihlen. Theirs had been a large and chaotic romance that
was in many respects a product of the particular times (the 1960s) and the
specific place (the Greek island of Hydra) in which they met. The
relationship’s legacy was a catalogue of classic songs – So Long Marianne, Hey, That’s No Way
to Say Goodbye, Bird on the Wire – a great deal of heartache, but also a
lasting sense of the creative power of love.
All of this the
documentary maker Nick Broomfield explores
in his tender, funny and hauntingly moving new film Marianne and
Leonard: Words of Love. Broomfield is not a disinterested observer. He knew
Ihlen well. They too were lovers for a while during one of the long breaks in
Ihlen’s relationship with Cohen. And her effect on the film-maker was almost as
influential as her part in the Canadian poet-musician’s career.
In 1968, when
Broomfield was 20, he’d just finished his first year at Cardiff University,
where he was reading law. His heart was not really in becoming a barrister and,
on a Hellenic cruise with his parents, Rosalind Runcie, the wife of the future
archbishop of Canterbury, gave him some advice. “She was the life and soul of
the party,” he recalls, “and she made me promise to go to Hydra when I got off
the boat.” He kept the promise
and encountered a captivating new world. “There was this incredible community
of artists and painters and a whole very wild attitude to life,” he says in his
trademark languorous drawl, located somewhere between the home counties and
southern California
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