Leonard Cohen’s Greek island love story with his muse, Marianne
A spellbinding new series on SBS explores the stormy and passionate romance between musical icon Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen.
Leonard Cohen was called “the poet of brokenness” by Rolling Stone in its obituary of the poet, singer and songwriter who died in 2016. But unlike the “forsaken, almost human” character in Susanne, that first song that drew attention to him, he didn’t sink “beneath your wisdom like a stone”.
Instead, he became one of the most influential artists of his time. There have been more than 2000 covers of his songs, with their dark, poetic lyrics – “Depression was the engine of my work” he said – recorded by artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Elton John and Justin Timberlake.
As Rolling Stone said, the “brokenness” was always there in his music and in his life. It marked his longtime relationship, too, with the woman he loved until they died within months of each other.
Her name was Marianne Ihlen and Cohen immortalised her in his wonderful song So Long, Marianne, which was released as part of his 1967 debut album.
And now it is the title of a television drama that explores the love story between the Canadian singer and poet and his Norwegian lover, who was such an important part of his life.
It was a relationship that began so tumultuously on the Greek island of Hydra; its legacy a handful of classic songs: So Long, Marianne, Bird on the Wire, and Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.
And, as the series dramatises, even though their time together was characterised by chaos, uncertainty, disappointment, and heartache, it somehow endured despite the unhappiness it created for both.
“And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that,” he wrote to her just before she died. “But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”
The series is from the inventive and busy Norwegian director and writer Oystein Karlsen, celebrated for his series Dag (2010-2015), One Night (2017), and the international hit Exit (2019). This was a study of excess in the lives of a group of male bankers, a juggling act of obligations, money, lies and inside trading, “capitalism on steroids” Karlsen says, a drama based on actual stories from Norway’s financial scene.
Known for his dark, absurdist humour and original style, Karlsen is currently directing Jo Nesbo’s Detective Hole, the highly anticipated Netflix adaptation of Nesbo’s bestselling Harry Hole series, starring Tobias Santelmann, Joel Kinnaman and Pia Tjelta.
As Karlsen says, his Cohen series is really a kind of coming-of-age story about a group of young people who for many different reasons found themselves on an island, jewel of the Saronic Gulf, that seemed magical with promise. There was Ihlen (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), then married to the dissolute Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen (Jonas Strand Gravli), a writer determined to reject bourgeois conventions and unable to control his interest in other women.
There were Australian writers Charmian Clift (Anna Torv) and George Johnston (Noah Taylor), a somewhat dissolute pair, seemingly rarely sober, who were King and Queen of the expats and their intense, interwoven lives. George the life of every party, Charmian, promiscuous and fiercely independent. “You can’t let your happiness depend on men,” she tells Ehlen on meeting her. “Or you will live in a world of pain.”
And of course the young Leonard Cohen played with extraordinary verisimilitude by Alex Wolff, himself a musician, who went to astonishing lengths to be as authentic as Cohen as possible. He even changed his voice slightly after Cohen had a tooth removed.
It’s a beautifully told story that crosses the world with the lovers, travelling from Norway to Greece, New York, and Montreal, with the majority of the series filmed on the picturesque Greek island of Hydra where they lived during the 1960s.
“They end up in this strange little community on this island where there were hippies five or six years prior to the hippie movement ever existing, and everyone was sleeping with everyone and drinking and doing drugs and all of that,” Karlsen says. “And along the way, they found themselves. That’s basically what it’s about. One of them just happened to be Leonard Cohen.”
As Cohen later recalled: “It was as if everyone was young and beautiful and full of talent – covered with a kind of gold dust. Everybody had special and unique qualities. This is, of course, the feeling of youth, but in the glorious setting of Hydra, all these qualities were magnified.”
But as Karlsen and his collaborators dramatise so poignantly, both Ihlen and Cohen discover they are both broken people when they meet, “but trying to the best of their ability to fix that by giving each other love, for better or worse”.
As Cohen says at the beginning of Karlsen’s series, “What is love anyway? It’s the one that comes and goes without leaving a mark, but then there is that other kind that stays with you your whole life.” So Long, Marianne is his quite beautiful, if at times testing, account of that kind of love.
Karlsen became involved with the story of the enduring relationship between Cohen and Ihlen when producer Ingebord Klyve, with whom he had worked on the hit series Exit, suggested he listen to a radio documentary about Ihlen that was made by Norwegian pubcaster NRK in the early 2000s and resurfaced after her death in July 2016.
Her life on Hydra alerted him to “an entire expat community” of which he was previously unaware, he told Drama Quarterly. “The universe started populating itself, and it became much more multi-layered than we thought it was,” he says of the origins of the series.
It was developed and co-created by Karlsen, Klyve with Tony Wood, producer of unflinching Nordic thriller Marcella, and directed by Karlsen and the brilliant Bronwen Hughes, responsible for some of the best episodes of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. And the series, while largely improvised, was written by Karlsen, Klyve, Wood and crime writer Nesbo, an addition that disconcerted some rather precious critics in advance of seeing the series but his episode, the final, is terrific.
The series is produced by Redpoint Productions, Buccaneer, Tanweer Productions and C3 Media for Norway’s NRK and Canada’s Crave, with Cineflix Rights handling international distribution. There are a lot of producers involved and Karlsen told Drama Quarterly all had their own audiences in mind as the series developed.
Behind the scenes, Karlsen had to work closely with the various international partners attached to the project, who naturally all had ideas about how they wanted the series to develop with their own audiences in mind.
“It’s a weird dynamic because the Canadians obviously feel this is a story about Leonard Cohen, and NRK, who put up the first money, thinks this is a story about Marianne,” he said.
“Then somewhere in between, you have the Greeks who want Greece to shine as much as possible. It’s a weird balance, especially when you get editing notes from 16 executives. Sometimes we just send the same version of an episode back and they say, ‘It’s good’.”
Somehow Karlsen pulls it altogether into a beguiling story about the way that the ideal of romantic meaning and passion can, at close quarters, prove so difficult. Even when the setting is as beautiful as Hydra. It’s superbly filmed, and directed with compassion and style, mixing Cohen’s music and poetry to tell the story of his relationship with Ihlen.
The series is meditatively paced, melancholic as you might expect with Cohen, and emotional-driven. Karlsen cleverly mixes cinematic styles, flashback sequences in black and white filling in the background to both Cohen and Ihlen’s pasts in their different cities, and occasional bursts of home movies – as if taken by spectators to their lives – and even a kind of zany Super 8 recounting of Cohen’s time in Cuba during the Castro revolution.
The acting is impeccable, both Sofie Loch Naess and Wolff inseparable from their characterisations, Loch Naess using her natural beauty and charm to inhabit Marianne and Wolff a startling incarnation of the young Leonard Cohen, even to his singing.
In a 1992 song, Anthem, Cohen sang, “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” And while this show deals with depression, infidelity, unhappiness, the difficulties of love, and the tortuous pursuit of art, there is also a lot of light.
So Long, Marianne is streaming on SBS On Demand.
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