Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love

Wonderfully made.Poetic and insightful .Gives you a good idea of what it was like to love Leonard Cohen and be loved by him.

This is about a very special relationship over many years, and will certainly appeal to aficionados of Leonard Cohen. The story is well told and you will probably shed a tear at the end. If you enjoy the music and verse of Leonard Cohen then this is a film for you.

Patched together from interviews and old home movies, this 100-minute documentary charts the 10-year romance between Leonard Cohen and the woman he called his 'Muse', Marianne Ihlen from Norway, whom he met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960.

There were other women - many of them, sometimes more than one a day. Free Love, fueled by drugs - acid, uppers, downers - was just an excuse for promiscuity, but promiscuity was mandatory in the 1960s. And not without casualties: suicides and deaths from overdoses. Marianne had a son by her first husband, Axel, whom we see as a happy child on the island. Like other children of that era, he ended in an institution.

Cohen has given us some great songs, and his dark gravelly voice is one of the iconic sounds of the last sixty years, but Nick Broomfield's unflinching documentary paints a portrait of an egotistical, self-destructive man who took up women and dropped them as casually as a Kleenex.

Three months before he died and knowing death was coming, he sent a love-letter to Marianne who was in her final days. So maybe, the man had a heart. His songs seem to say so, but his life rather less so.

In some ways this film can be seen as an extended victim impact report. It is about Marianne who clearly contributed much to Cohens life on more than one level.

It also leaves a great deal unsaid and hazy. The assumption is that the cultural moments of the day ( and the copious drugs) have blurred the stories in many many ways. Despite all of that it somehow brings the back story of Marianne and Leonard into focus in a very sweet way towards the end of the film.

A number of the interviewees are just plain great. Watch out forAviva Layton who seems to be uncredited but she deserves better.

In many ways this film could have been much better if we had got past the headlines. Archival footage is used but the viewpoint most of the time is very much the male point of view.

This much thoughtless behaviour seems highly paradoxical. The myth of the unreachable poet seems to have attracted considerable numbers of women to the Cohen fan club. They felt like they were being understood. But seems to me; if that were really true - the story would have turned out quite differently.

What lifts this film is the redemption towards the end when we see the famous letter from Leonard to Marianne. In his dying moments Leonard recognised the value of his connection with Marianne. Coverage of the 5 or 6 years in a Buddhist monastery definitely hints at a rebalancing of Cohens' personal life and perspectives.

All in all this is a rather gentle sideways look at a significant relationship but understandably it is overbalanced by the the celebrity aspects of the story.

Marianne herself is present in the story but mostly in a back handed compliment kind of way.

An incredibly moving documentary finishing with a film of Marianne's reaction on her death bed to Cohen's final message to her. It dragged a little in the mid section but that is far outweighed by the power of this emotional film.