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L eonard cohen muse8/9/2023 ![]() Everyone, it seems, is having a good time. There’s enjoyable archive of Cohen at work (and play). Others, including members of Cohen’s touring band, attest to Cohen’s voracious appetite for women and drugs, as the dawn of a new era beckons, and the tours and accolades pile up. We hear how Ihlen scolded her in writing for covering Cohen’s songs and “ruining her life”. Collins famously cut Suzanne a year before the public heard his own version. Collins gives great testimony to Cohen’s own reticence as a performer – hard to believe now, given the man’s lively late-career revival prior to his death in 2016. Cohen’s move off the island and into the arms of music-led success coincides with the film shifting away from Ihlen, as she gently fades from view and his globe-trotting star shines ever brighter.Įnter Judy Collins, who becomes a both a supporter and a prop for the stage-wary Cohen. In archive footage we see and hear from Cohen and Ihlen, who lived on the island in the early-to-mid 1960s, when rock’s great poet was struggling with depression and failing at becoming a novelist, while also soaking up the sun (and local substances). Hydra, the Greek island where they met, was evidently a potent, liberating meeting point for like-minded creatives and, as it turns out, hedonists. While Ihlen inspired some of Cohen’s greatest work – most famously, ‘So Long, Marianne’ and ‘Bird on the Wire’ – she also encouraged Broomfield to become a documentary filmmaker. Not that he goes that far here, with this mournful ode to Marianne Ihlen, the single mother who made Leonard Cohen swoon, and whom the director also briefly dated. Having kept himself uncharacteristically out of Whitney: Can I Be Me, it’s almost a relief to find Nick Broomfield – once known as “the man with the boom” – potentially threatening to upstage his own subject. ![]() Documentarian Nick Broomfield shows his romantic side with this touching portrait of Leonard Cohen and his muse.
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