Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (2019)

Directed by: Nick Broomfield | 102 minutes | documentary, music | Starring: Leonard Cohen, Marianne Ihlen, Nick Broomfield, Nancy Bacal, Jeffrey Brown, Judy Collins, Ron Cornelius, Billy Donovan, Julie Felix, Helle Goldman, Aviva Layton, Irving Layton, John Lissauer, Don Lowe, Marty Machat, Jan Christian Mollestad , John Simon, George Slater, Rick Vick, Jennifer Warnes, Udo Jurgens

Anyone familiar with the controversial ‘Kurt & Courtney’ (1998) will be wary of another work by Nick Broomfield. A documentary filmmaker with tunnel vision adversarial – Courtney Love would have had Kurt Cobain killed in contrast to the widely accepted reading of suicide, makes it very easy on himself – though Broomfield found access to a world no one had explored, and well worth the effort. worth investigating.

However, roll hygiene was foreign to Broomfield in the said documentary. His informal style certainly has charm, a quality that also exudes ‘Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love’. Once again, it’s a doomed relationship, this time dipped in incense rather than poison. It is also inevitable with a gentleman poet like Leonard Cohen, who shrouded his failures with cool beauty, and immortalized them in ‘So Long, Marianne’, among others.

Broomfield has not been a fly on the wall, both Marianne and Leonard passed away in 2016, rather a mellow narrator. He lets both lovers tell in archival material, a nice counterweight. Cohen condensed reality, because ‘I am an artist, and life is an art’. The Norwegian Marianne Ihlen found this attractive, but it is also the call of the Sirens, a more beautiful reality than the lives of non-artists can offer. The artist does suffer from life.

He has no other choice, his being is too strong, and even if it leads to deep depression: the muse always brings him back on top and transforms his pain. The artist is not possessed by anyone, and that requires fierce women. Marianne was one, otherwise you wouldn’t go after a poet. Broomfield is somewhat rehabilitating himself with this BBC documentary, keeping himself in the background in this story. Love remains in solidified memory. We have artists like Cohen for that.