“Poets do not make good husbands. You can’t own them. You can’t even own a bit of them”, says Aviva Layton in Nick Broomfield’s new documentary, Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love. She would know: the poet Irving Layton was her partner for more than 20 years, until he had an affair with another woman and she left him in the late 1970s.
This sun-drenched film offers a sentimental look at the relationship of Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen, who first met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960. It explores how, having spent much of the Sixties together, Ihlen inspired Cohen’s songs “So Long, Marianne” and “Bird on the Wire”: he the ever-complex artist, she the passive muse. It ends with the much-reported letter he wrote to her decades later, as she lay on her deathbed: “I’ve never forgotten your love and your beauty. But you know that. I don’t have to say any more.” Cohen died less than four months after Ihlen in 2016, the neat timing of which is read as a sign of the serendipity of their relationship: despite not remaining together as a couple, Ihlen and Cohen were bound for life.
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