Nor was the admittedly selfish Cohen about to let her go hooking up with her whenever the mood struck for several decades afterward. But it did not deter her pining for the gravelly voiced crooner until her death in 2016. “My love for him destroyed me,” we hear her say convincingly. She cooked, cleaned and waited on him diligently with hardly a “thanks.” And when fortune finally arrived, she and her young son, Axel, were not part of the ride. With the help of Judy Collins, Cohen finally found his calling as a singer/songwriter, and the resulting success left little room for Marianne, whom he’d spent the past eight years living with on Hydra while attempting to find himself. No longer was he the failed novelist whose last book, “Beautiful Losers,” was a widely panned bomb. Their time together on the Greek island of Hydra in 1968 yields spectacular footage of the Norwegian beauty looking much like a goddess, even as her life was falling apart amid Cohen taking flight as the hottest new thing on the burgeoning New York folk scene. Although their affair barely lasted a song, her impact on him leaks through his sympathetic profile of a woman who inspired creativity but reaped none of the benefits. In a way, she became Broomfield’s muse, too. What emerges is an intensely personal film from the cynic who brought us “Kurt & Courtney” and “Biggie and Tupac.” It’s also his most emotional work, largely because he was one of Marianne’s revenge dalliances carried out as a way of getting even with Cohen when her greatest love was out on the road bedding just about every female he met. What we gained, she lost, as evidenced in the affecting “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love,” Nick Bloomfield’s latest celebrity documentary about what must be history’s most one-sided love affair. Like a leech, the introspective poet who wrote the ubiquitous “Hallelujah” sucked the lifeblood from the gorgeous but fragile Marianne Ihlen for both his and our great benefit. Life ain’t easy for a muse, particularly if the man you’re inspiring is the legendary Leonard Cohen.
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