2024-09-24 12:27:52
The eight-part biopic tells the story of Leonard Cohen and Norwegian lover Marianne Ihlen on the island of Hydra. A few films have already been made about him, and the singer has immortalized his muse in songs. The muse thing was a perfect understanding.
Anyone who knows the joy of loving life also knows the question: “Will you give me praise?” As Marianne Ihlen asks Leonard Cohen in “So Long, Marianne”, part eight NDR seriesare both around 30 and have been a couple for six years. Cohen said what they said: He was going to die soon, you had to tell him the news.
Of course, no one knows whether the vows of love were established in exactly the same way, one sunny morning on the island of Hydra in the Greek Aegean, before the two parted ways. What we do know is that Leonard Cohen wrote a farewell letter to Marianne Ihlen when she died. This is how the series began, and this is how it ended after six and a half hours. Cohen writes: She is not a woman, it is easy to love others more than herself; he had known him long before he met him; their love will last longer than both their lives. “I never forgot your love and beauty. But you know I don’t have to say anything anymore. Safe travels, old friend! I’m behind you, so close I can touch your hand. See it at the end of the road. “
The story has been told many times because it is as big as the biggest love games. In non-fiction books, documentaries and now, in the year of Leonard and Marianne’s 90th birthdays, there are also podcasts. Often as a story of genius and muse. “So Long, Marianne” turns what we know and everything that can be imagined into a detailed biopic and therefore stays close to the sources on which the series is based: Cohen’s life work. Songs like “So Long, Marianne”.
An annoying thing about such biopics can also be seen in this series, for which the authors from the home countries of their two heroes, Canada and Norway, are not stronger than the Norwegian-Canadian directors. Alex Wolff and Leonard. With his hunched over and wise smile, Cohen appears more Cohen-like than Cohen himself probably is. Parodies of the people of his time appeared around him. Nico and Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and Lou Reed. Thea Sofie Loch Næss, as Marianne Ihlen, a legend captured by small films and black and white photographs, has an easy time removing herself from the famous images in her head and using her history to tell a story this.
The good thing about biopics like this is that you know how it ends. No one runs the risk of revealing to others something that they also want to see and cannot suspect. The fact that Leonard Cohen, when he left Hydra and Marianne Ihlen in the 1960s, was celebrated as a musician, next to Bob Dylan, is not a joke.
Like a lover, a liar
“So Long, Marianne”, the series, tells how she ended up on Hydra: in 1960, with a Canadian literary prize for her poems, she fled her family in Montreal, first to London and, because London interfered with his poetry, from where the bohemians are already founded a colony. To the island that has the name of a creature from Greek mythology, but above all allows poor artists to live like rich people. Hydra is the smallest space available, says Charmain Clift. She and her husband George Johnston were the royal couple of writing and drinking. Cohen goes to bed with her – until he meets Marianne Ihlen as she carries three pots of water through the aisles and falls in love with her.
The series does not show Cohen’s long journey yet, from Montreal to the Mediterranean, on his escape from a house in which he lives with his demented stepfather, a Rabbi, and with his depressed mother, away from home – soft work where available. took family after he dropped out of college and wanted to make a living from writing. Everything is black and white. His life only changed color when he arrived at the island port and bought a house when his grandmother left him a legacy of 1,500 dollars.
“So Long, Marianne” is not a small epic about Marianne’s dreams, her journey with the writer Axel Jensen in the fifties, from Oslo to Southeast Europe, in a red VW Beetle. They lived on Hydra in 1957 and their son was born in 1959. The series shows a love that could not be more toxic. When Marianne falls in love with a poet from Canada, she is alone with her son.
In all appearances in books and movies, the love between Leonard and Marianne is deep and toxic. Leonard, a manic singer and dark soul who, when their house is connected to the telephone network and a pigeon sits on the line outside the window, writes a song about it, “Win on the Wire” with lines like: “And if I, if I’m true / it’s just that I think a lover has to be such a liar too”. And if I have been unfaithful with you, it is because I think a lover should be such a liar. And Marianne, his “Nordic Angel” and for him the best woman on earth, who provided a home for his soul and gave him a family that protected him, even from himself. Not in the series and not in life either, otherwise he would have failed and not understood everything: Cohen’s work as a poet of his poems and his family with Suzanne Elrod – and Ihlen’s return to Oslo, his work in sources people and their new family. called Stang. Love lasts, but only gives him life on Hydra.
“So Long, Marianne” also shows why. On the Hydra symbiosis they work: Leonard, a handsome, happy, intelligent man with more manic phases and a beautiful, happy, intelligent woman with her hope that everything can always stay as it is, when it is just as it should be. He sings lullabies. They swam in the sea. At night they danced to the bouzouki in the restaurant and got drunk with their British and American, Australian and Norwegian friends. sunrise He sits at the typewriter or wakes her and her son up with the guitar. They went to Oslo, they tried Montreal, where Marianne said: “I don’t know you here.” table, He saved him from death when his nerves gave out and his kidneys failed.
He went again and again to promote his books and, like Bob Dylan, to write and sing songs. To New York to the Chelsea Hotel and, when Judy Collins appeared on the radio with her “Suzanne”, to the Columbia studios, where, at the age of 32, she recorded her first album. Every departure on Hydra is preceded by a heated debate. Cohen refused “Long live, Marianne”: “Your letters, they all say you’re close to me now / Then why do I feel alone? / I’m standing on a place and your beautiful spider page / Are you putting my ankle on the stone.” He wrote her letters in which he was always with her, but he felt alone; he stood on the rock, the spider’s web on the stone stairs.
Marianne is more than a museum. Their love is not asymmetrical, the positions and conditions are. Cohen reminded himself again and again in his poems and in his songs, until his death, in “Kind Days” and “What Happens to the Heart,” his own question, before he died in fall of 2016, three months after Marianne Ihlen.
And “So Long, Marianne”, the series, is more than just a multi-part film about Leonard Cohen and the woman he loved throughout his life and beyond. A short film about the best thing that can happen to you in life on earth. Eternal love.
From October 2, 2024 on NDR and now in the ARD media library
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