Mark Reviews Movies: MARIANNE & LEONARD: WORDS OF LOVE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 11, 2019

Director Nick Broomfield is thoroughly convinced of the grandly romantic love between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, the woman who served as the singer/songwriter's muse during the early part of his career. According to Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, theirs was romance that began strongly, faded with Cohen's sudden success, and maybe lingered in the two's minds for the remainder of their lives, which, coincidentally, ended three months apart.

There's a gap in this narrative, of course, between the relationship fading and Ihlen's receipt of a short letter from Cohen on her death bed. That's where Broomfield's optimistic thesis of a love that transcends time and space kind of falls apart. We don't have to believe what the filmmaker clearly believes about these two for the movie to work, obviously. Even as presented in the documentary, though, the course of their story never quite lines up with Broomfield's central point.

Much is made of Cohen's life during the 1960s, when he lived on the Greek island of Hydra, where he wrote poetry and a novel before turning to song. It's also where he met Ihlen, a woman with a young son. She inspired Cohen, and in turn, he was a lover and like a father to her son.

Once Cohen's music career began, though, he became more distant, spending less and less time living with Ihlen, although their relationship has been immortalized in songs like "So Long, Marianne" and "Bird on the Wire." Eventually, they separated completely, with Ihlen returning to her native Norway and marrying another man, while Cohen became world famous.

If that sounds like the end of the story, it pretty much is. Although Broomfield attempts to connect the lives of his central figures during the proceeding tale of their respective lives, the documentary ends up leaning heavily toward Cohen, whose famous life is far more eventful than Ihlen's more ordinary one. Broomfield knew Ihlen, and about half of the minimal details we learn about her post-Cohen life come from the filmmaker via voice-over.

With only some trivial information about Ihlen (and the strange story of how Hydra ultimately seemed to destroy more people than it raised), Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love essentially becomes a biography of Cohen. That's fine, perhaps, but it certainly isn't the love story Broomfield promises.

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