'Marianne & Leonard' examines the relationship between Leonard Cohen and his muse Marianne Ilhen —and there's a reason her name comes first in the title. Our review
Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love
charts the friendship, love affairs and off-on relationship between these two, which resulted in broken hearts, cold shoulders and several unbelievably beautiful songs. After instantly connecting, the two fell into what Ihlen describes as a fairly stock male artist/female muse relationship: He spent his days writing his novel “Beautiful Losers” and taking speed; she went shopping and prepped meals and supported him.
Eventually, Leonard feels compelled to return to his native Montreal, where his career as the next Norman Mailer gets sidetracked. One day, he happens to play folk singer Judy Collins a bit of “Suzanne.” She records the song and turns it into a hit. Collins gets him to perform part of it at a fundraiser and Cohen leaves the stage halfway through, sobbing. She brings him back. They finish it together. A star is born.
But the payoff is huge. There’s a lot of great Cohen footage, much of it taken from the invaluable 1974 tour diaryMarianne & Leonardutopia went from hedonistic freedom to marriages dissolving and both donkeys and kids being unwittingly dosed“People took it too far,” one talking head notes, and the already fine line between anything-goes and everything-falls-apart gets blurred beyond recognition. There are cracks in the permissive postcard paradise — that’s how the darkness gets in.
What makes this film unmissable, however, is the fact that we get Marianne’s story more or less in full as well. It’s a fleshing out of someone who was more than just a muse, more than just an object of affection for a notorious ladies’ man, a famous singer and an infamous bastard. We’ve heard the now-famous letter that the musician wrote to Ilhen as she lay on her deathbed, of how he was “just a little behind you” in terms of time running out.
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