The song remains the same – So long, Marianne, it’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.
Nick Broomfield’s Marianne & Leonard – Words of Love is a compelling refrain to Leonard Cohen’s song, it’s muse and meaning, the beautiful yet tragic love story between Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen, that began on the idyllic Greek island of Hydra in 1960 as part of a bohemian community of foreign artists, writers and musicians.
Among those bohemians were a cluster of Australians, most prominently George Johnson and Charmian Clift, their family and retinue. A survivor of that cohort, is the brilliant Aviva Layton is interviewed at length in the film and gives priceless first hand insight, anecdote and testimony to the narrative.
Her eyewitness candour gives credence to the catastrophe it caused on the children of the bohemians, and the miscarriages of marriages.
The film follows Marianne and Leonard’s relationship from the early days when Cohen thought he was “some kind of Gypsy boy before he let her take him home” in the early days on Hydra, a humble time of ‘free love’ and open marriage, to how their love evolved, devolved, dissolved when Leonard became a successful musician.
The film gives pictorial heft and corroboration to Cohen’s So Long Marianne: “I’m standing on a ledge and your fine spider web is fastening my ankle to a stone.”
Cohen stepped off the ledge and embarked on a singing career, interspersed with a sabbatical as a Buddhist monk.
Nevertheless, Marianne and Leonard’s was a love story that would continue for the rest of their lives, through the tyranny of distance, the highs and lows of Leonard’s career, preserved by the inspirational power that Marianne possessed.
Marianne and Leonard died three months apart. Guess the angels never forgot to pray for them.
