“So long, Marianne”: Leonard Cohen: A river of toxic masculinity

Masculinity at the expense of other, mostly female, fellow human beings – inflationarily but correctly called “toxic” – has many faces: the doughy one of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, for example, the angry one of ex-President Donald Trump, the youthful one of his predecessor Bill Clinton, the childish one of the joker Luke Mockridge or quite old and yet completely new: the narrow-lipped one by the Norwegian writer Axel Jensen. Don’t you know? Let’s get to know you!

In the ARD series “So long, Marianne” he forms the poisonous contrast to a legend that everyone now knows: Leonard Cohen. Before the Canadian poet became the greatest singer/songwriter of his time, he spent his formative years on the Greek island of Hydra. An artist’s refuge not far from Athens, where the Jewish writer moved in 1959 to avoid working in his parents’ textile factory, to emancipate himself from his religious family, to be free and to write about it.

And he was able to do all of this because of what was probably the most important encounter of his career: Marianne Ihlen (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). A woman between two men who, on the surface, could hardly be more different, but ultimately have a lot in common: her friend Axel Jensen (Jonas Strand Gravli) makes the pregnant woman’s life in the holiday paradise hell, which Leonard Cohen (Alex Wolff) escapes with empathy , whispering voice and doe eyes seem to come out. But all of this is just to lead them to a somewhat cooler damnation.

“They called me a womanizer, but I never was,” Cohen says gently in voiceover as he ruffles the sheets with two playmates.

Just as director Øystein Karlsen – who has been very familiar with destructive masculinity since the financial world series “Exit” – introduces his main character according to his own script, his hubris becomes clear early on: “They called me a womanizer, but I never was,” says Cohen gently Off, while he ruffles the sheets with two playmates, “it was just easier for me to love others than myself.” At this point he would already be assured of the approval of the groupie-eating Rammstein Till Lindemann.

And with that, welcome to the film industry of portrayed icons from various art genres, from music (Amadeus) to poetry (Schiller) to painting (Caravaggio), whose toxic behavior is reinterpreted as the involuntary reversal of the instincts of productive passions. If you don’t misunderstand Karlsen’s biopic, he too falls into the muse kiss trap. His hero, already known but not famous thanks to popular poems, wants to find himself on Hydra in 1959 and meets a crowd of interesting personalities while trying to do the same away from civilization.

Cohen ends up in bed with his first travel acquaintance, the beautiful but much older writer Charmian Clift (Anna Torv), where the equally beautiful but much younger Marianne soon lies. While the former escapes from a threadbare marriage, the latter does so from a passive-aggressive relationship. Both men are apparently liberal, but both are also splendid examples of an era of self-liberation that only interprets the traditional gender relationship in a more cultured way.

And so Marianne takes refuge in the arms of the Canadian poet, with whom she enters into a relationship because, unlike the father of her unborn child, he does not exercise any (physical) violence against her. In an enchantingly filmed environment, surrounded by a soundtrack that writes itself with composers playing a leading role, we accompany this legendary pair of soul wonders and related individuals for almost eight hours through the ambivalent sixties.

Supplemented by original images, songs and voices, the result is a double portrait of the world’s greatest folk singer alongside Bob Dylan. And of a filmmaker who forgives Leonard Cohen for his sins. A relative explains to him (i.e. us) why in the black-and-white Montreal: “Your primary task is to enlighten us human beings about the dark abyss that lies deep within us.” And that’s what the ARD broadcasts in the media library quasi-absolution, to treat women nicely but like shit all your life.

Don’t misunderstand: “So long, Marianne” is an elegant, sensitive, ravishingly beautiful star cut with depth, grace and a feel for compulsively smoking, drinking, philosophizing figures in pop culture. A long, calm river like Cohen’s work. Only: Øystein Karlsen makes the mistake of many portraits of such idolized personalities of attributing their attraction to the mob not to their popularity, but to their personality. In times of #MeToo, an antiquated error. Albeit a very, very worth seeing one.

Available in the ARD media library