There’s that word, which Ihlen carried – part honor, part burden – all the way to her death in 2016, just a few months before Cohen’s own passing. Everything has its cost in this account, which is as valuable as social history as it is a compelling dual portrait of an artist and his muse. Those seismic personal and cultural changes are gracefully conveyed by filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who interleaves “Marianne & Leonard” with his own deeply intimate narrative: He met Ihlen in 1968 in Greece, and they maintained their friendship long after Cohen and she called it quits.įilled with sun-kissed images of Hydra at its most hedonistic and idyllic, as well as mesmerizing footage from Cohen’s later tours, “Marianne & Leonard” includes several first-person accounts from the witnesses still around to tell the tale.īroomfield does a particularly good job of immersing viewers in Hydra’s halcyon pleasures, then gently exposing the community’s darker shadows. The connection was instant and electrifying, and they would be a couple throughout the ’60s, during which time Cohen would transform from a relatively obscure poet to a folk star and, for depressive teenage girls of discerning taste, an unlikely sex symbol. “There we were, two refugees,” she recalls in one of several audio recordings used in the film. It was there, in a market, where Cohen met Ihlen, the soon-to-be-single mother of a young son. The absorbing documentary “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love” chronicles the creative and romantic collaboration between musician Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, who inspired several of his earliest songs, including “So Long, Marianne.”Ĭohen’s fans already know the outlines of their story: Having become a successful poet in his native Canada in the 1950s, Cohen decamped for the Greek island of Hydra, joining a group of expats, artists, drifters and bohemians attracted by the sea, retsina, free sex and LSD.
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