Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love (8/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 102 minutes.

R.

What I knew about Leonard Cohen has basically been limited to k.d. lang’s rendition of his song “Hallelujah,” which I like. So this was an eye-opening documentary. It tells of his visit to the Greek island of Hydra as an impoverished young poet from an upper class Canadian family, how he met Marianne Ihlen, how they came together, how he wrote an apparently horrible book in 1966, “Beautiful Losers,” while on the island, and how he became a pop star and became a different person.

Directed by Nick Broomfield, it is definitely not an unbiased film made by someone without a point of view as Broomfield was one of Marianne’s lovers after Cohen left Hydra. So the POV of this film is pretty sympathetic and non-judgmental, although it does not hide the facts, just soft-pedals them.

One of the things I applaud is that when people talk, they are identified by a caption, no matter how many times they have appeared. The director does not assume that the viewer remember who these people are. Hurrah!

Cohen friend on Hydra Aviva Layton (wife of poet Irving) said about Cohen, “he was crazy. You’d have to be crazy to write ‘Beautiful Losers,’ because it was ‘hallucinogenic madness.’ He used to stay out there in that hot Greek sun and Marianne would make him little baskets of food and water and drop the water to him. He wrote that book in a fever; he never would have been able to do that anywhere else except on that island. He was dropping acid all the time.”

He left Hydra and met Folk star Judy Collins in NY and played her a song he had written, “Suzanne,” and she immediately said she had to record it. And it became a hit. After she recorded it, she encouraged him to appear onstage and sing “Suzanne.” His stage fright was such that shortly after beginning he started bawling and rushed off stage. She forced him back onto the stage and stood with him while he sang the song and his career as a rock star was born.

The film is filled with amazing archival films of their life on Hydra when Cohen was an unknown and interviews with people who knew them throughout their lives. While Cohen speaks of Hydra as a paradise, Broomfield goes on to tell of the devastation of the people, families, who lived on Hydra, like the Johnsons with whom Cohen first stayed when he moved there.

The film shows that Cohen was a rock star of low moral tone, existing on drugs and sleeping with as many women as he could, which was, apparently, limitless. His relationship with Marianne lasted seven years and it continued after he left Hydra, and intermittently in Canada at the same time that he was living with another woman in Canada. And all the while he was jumping into bed with just about any other woman with whom he came in contact. There’s even a scene of a beautiful woman fan offering herself to him that seemed to me to have been staged, but maybe it’s real. Why would there just happened to have been a camera with sound equipment there to pick up the conversation?

As for Marianne and her many lovers, she killed her and Cohen’s baby through abortion apparently because she didn’t think Cohen wanted her to deliver it. Not surprisingly with a mother like this, her son that she had before she met Cohen turned out to be a mess.

Ron Cornelius, a sessions musician who toured with Cohen, said that they were taking a strong drug known as “desert dust” (which I assume is really called “Angel Dust” which is also known as PCP) daily and playing concerts 23 nights in a row at places like the Royal Albert Hall and the Vienna Opera House and when they took it they were “gone for 14 hours and no re-entry, none,” which sounds pretty scary to me.

I found this to be an interesting documentary about someone of whom I had little knowledge. Maybe the many fans of Cohen know what he was about, but I imagine there will be a lot in here that will interest fans and non-fans alike.