Alex Wolff as Leonard Cohen (left) and Thea Sofie Loch Naess as Marianne Ihlen star in So Long, Marianne.HO/The Canadian Press
In retrospectives, famous male artists and the lesser-known female lovers who inspired their art often find themselves, to borrow a lyric from Leonard Cohen, “on different sides of a line nobody drew.” But is it possible to tell a story about a musician and a muse and give both their proper due?
So Long, Marianne, an eight-part miniseries that starts streaming this week on Bell Media’s Crave, gives the prestige TV treatment to the much mythologized love story of Canadian poet and songwriter Cohen and his on-and-off Norwegian lover Marianne Ihlen.
Oystein Karlsen, the Norwegian showrunner (Dag, Exit) of this international co-production, is aiming to tell the tale of the love Cohen sacrificed on the altar of fame, with all its various positions represented. “It’s the whole span of their relationship – and hopefully it’s nuanced to a degree where we see both his and her perspective of the whole thing,” says Karlsen, in an interview from overseas over Zoom.
Cohen and Ihlen famously met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960 – both in their 20s and having traded bourgeois upbringings for bohemian lifestyles. Ihlen had gone there with an increasingly abusive and aggressively unfaithful husband, the Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen, while Cohen had fled to its sunny climes to plug away on the poems collected in Flowers for Hitler and his first novel The Favourite Game after a short stint in a gloomy London that had only increased his depression.
The two found themselves embedded in a community of expat artists drawn to the island by its affordability – one where marriages were open and closing time never really came.
In Karlsen’s retelling of their iconic love story, Ihlen and Cohen take turns helping the other through difficult times as the action moves from Hydra to Oslo, then to Montreal and New York – first as the former starts life as a single mother to her son, Axel Jr.; then as Cohen pivots toward a career as a singer/songwriter and leaves behind the poverty of a poet’s life, but not his demons.
Ihlen is the muse for So Long, Marianne, the first track on the B side on Cohen's 1967 debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen.nikos nikolopoulos/Crave
“Leonard saves her out of the relationship with Axel and then Marianne saves him back at the Chelsea Hotel when he was fairly strung out,” says Karlsen.
While Cohen and Ihlen’s love was not a victory march and did not end in marriage or children, it’s fascinated Cohenologists from its earliest mentions in the Jewish Montrealer’s poetry and music.
Marianne the muse is there in Flowers for Hitler (1964), and, of course, So Long, Marianne, the first track on the B side on his 1967 debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. A picture of the blond beauty sitting in a towel at his typewriter in Hydra graces the back cover of 1969′s Songs from a Room, by which time their romance was near its end.
Worldwide interest in the long tail of the pair’s short love story really exploded, however, when they left the world, one after the other in 2016.
Shortly after Ihlen passed away on July 28 of that year, a friend of hers went on CBC Radio’s As It Happens and spoke about a final deathbed letter that Cohen had sent her – and its economical poetry quickly went viral. “I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand,” Cohen wrote. “This old body has given up, just as yours has too. I’ve never forgotten your love and beauty. But you know that. I don’t have to say any more. Safe travels old friend. See you down the road.”
Less than four months later, Cohen did indeed follow and, amid the international mourning that broke out at his death, his final loving missive to Ihlen found an even wider audience.
Among the posthumous explorations of their pairing was Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, a 2019 documentary by English documentarian Nick Broomfield – yet another well-known artist who claimed to be a lover of Ihlen’s – that explored the on-and-off affair as well as the darker sides of life on Hydra between the 1950s to the 1970s. The lovers’ story, likewise, unfolds on the sidelines of Polly Samson’s 2020 novel A Theatre for Dreamers, set on Hydra in 1960.
Before those, Karlsen was already at work lining up all the partners needed to make So Long, Marianne – from its co-commissioners at the Norwegian national broadcaster NRK and Bell Media’s Crave, to co-producers Redpoint, C3 and Tanweer in Norway, Canada and Greece, respectively. (The Cohen estate is not involved but allowed licensing of all the crucial songs, such as Bird on a Wire, written on Hydra after its first telephone lines were put in.)
Cohen and Ihlen famously met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960 – both in their 20s and having traded bourgeois upbringings for bohemian lifestyles.nikos nikolopoulos/Crave
A fan of Cohen’s since he was a teenager, Karlsen’s interest in Ihlen was first seriously piqued by Kari Hesthamar’s award-winning 2005 NRK radio documentary about the muse, who eventually settled down back in Norway, got a job in the oil industry and married an engineer.
That was the first time Ihlen talked about her relationship with Cohen publicly. Cohen, by contrast, was notably less discreet about his affairs (he once apologized to the ghost of Janis Joplin for having revealed she was the woman on the unmade bed in Chelsea Hotel #2).
It was important to Karlsen to depict Cohen respectfully while also showing that his youthful suffering could be matched by selfishness – and he felt there was equal pressure on him to depict Ihlen in as many dimensions. Her family was involved from the start and he gained access to love letters owned by Axel Jr., whom Cohen sang lullabies to as a child, and who has been in and out of mental-health facilities for most of his adult life. (His guardian read the scripts.)
“The one thing that all her friends said was, ‘Don’t portray her as some sort of goody two-shoes, because she definitely wasn’t,’” says Karlsen.
Those burdens of representation were passed down to the stars of So Long, Marianne. Playing Cohen is Alex Wolff, an actor/musician whose career began when he was a child on a Nickelodeon musical series and whose recent roles include physicist Luis Alvarez in Oscar winner Oppenheimer. The American is the first to try his hand at incarnating, in a major film or television series, the man who wrote the world’s foremost secular hymn, Hallelujah.
He took it seriously, working with a vocal coach on both his Montreal accent and altering the register of his singing voice; he even studied flamenco guitar so he could imitate the finger-picking style that Cohen famously picked up from lessons with a Spanish man he met at a Westmount tennis court.
There’s plenty of film of Cohen to draw on from this period – notably the 1965 NFB documentary Ladies and Gentlemen … Leonard Cohen. But while Wolff, who remained in character while on set, says he “injected that footage straight into my veins,” he found reading Cohen’s words themselves – from his early poetry collections to his novels – most fruitful in trying to channel his spirit without lapsing into impersonation.
“When I felt like I was coming from a place that was more pure and not from an outside place, but coming from an inside place was when I was coming from the words,” says Wolff, who similarly immersed himself in the young Cohen’s favourite books and poems by James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus and Federico García Lorca.
Of playing Ihlen, Thea Sofie Loch Naess said: 'What was most important to me was to show that she was more than just this blond woman sitting at the feet of the great artist.'nikos nikolopoulos/Crave
The Norwegian actress Thea Sofie Loch Naess, a former child star, too, who has graduated to historical epics such as The Last King and The Last Kingdom, may have had more freedom to portray Ihlen – but she also felt a responsibility to portray a complex woman who craved both independence and security and had conflicted feelings about motherhood. “What was most important to me was to show that she was more than just this blond woman sitting at the feet of the great artist,” she says.
Helping both Naess and Wolff get the characters was the Greek island that inspired them both and has remained essentially untouched since the 1960s. ”When we were shooting on Hydra, a lot of the people there knew Marianne – and I received so much love, which was their love for Marianne,” recalls Naess. “She had a strong presence.”
Of course, there were challenges to shooting there too; Hydra continues to be a community without cars and so all the equipment had to be carried by hand or by mule.
Though many scenes were shot in Montreal, Canada does not have quite as vivid a presence on screen in So Long, Marianne – even Cohen’s friend and mentor, the poet Irving Layton is played by the Swedish actor Peter Stormare (The Big Lebowski, Fargo).
But Karlsen made sure to team up with Montreal producer Pablo Salzman right away – and the crew included collaborators of the late Quebec director Jean-Marc Vallée, such as cinematographer Ronald Plante (Sharp Objects). Canadian director and Better Call Saul veteran Bronwen Hughes, too, helmed half the episodes.
In the end, the pressure Karlsen may feel most is not that of getting Cohen or Ihlen right – but of doing Montreal justice. “Being Norwegian, portraying Cohen in Canada, it’s fairly scary,” he says.