She is as blonde as he is dark, as full as he feels empty, as bright as he is dark. Like Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen more than 60 years ago, Thea Sofie Loch Naess and Alex Wolff, the two star actors of the new series So long, Marianne, which comes out on Crave this week, form day and night together.
So much has been said, filmed, written about the relationship between Ilhen and Cohen. The new series will probably not go further in the revelations already known about the iconic couple, revealed among others in the documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, directed by Nick Broomfield and released in 2019. But this time we tackle the subject over eight episodes. The first two relate Cohen’s arrival in Hydra, where he is first welcomed into the house, then into the bed of the writer Charmian Clift. Then comes Marianne. Who tires of this love story bathed in the sun of the Greek island, and the guitar chords of Cohen’s famous song, So long, Mariannewhich gives its name to the series? And if Leonard and Marianne’s couple lasted ten years, their story of friendship lasted a lifetime.
Here, it is Marianne who occupies the space, alongside the illustrious poet and all the artistic fauna that populates Hydra. “She is full of love,” says Norwegian Thea Sofie Loch Naess, and “living is her art.” “I think what she would have wanted was to be given her place, and that’s what I wanted to do.” Also, the series puts forward her story, more than Cohen’s. It is that of the inner struggles of this young mother abandoned by her son’s father, as if thrown into the sea in the fauna of Hydra’s intellectuals.
Cohen wanted to be the man who “speaks so well that women fall into his arms when he says their name.” And they all did, or almost. But that didn’t console him.
A big void
This darkness, this inner emptiness of Cohen, which led him to “make women love him rather than loving himself”, the young Alex Wolff, who plays him on screen, seems to have experienced it up close.
“I’ve always had a big void in my life since my youth,” he said simply, at the launch of the series in Montreal this week. “And I think only Leonard Cohen could make me feel more complete.”
In an interview, Wolff says he fought for the role. “When I got the phone and said I had the part, it was 20 seconds of happiness and three years of anxiety.” At 26, Wolff is the same age Cohen was when he first set foot on the island of Hydra, where he met Marianne. Wolff also got into music, performing Cohen’s songs himself. “I had to learn guitar, but not too much. So I took, like Cohen, four classical guitar lessons,” he says. “Alex has the same sense of humor as Cohen,” Thea notes.
The series is a Canada-Norway co-production, and features a number of Quebec actors: Macha Grenon, Éric Bruneau, Kim Lévesque Lizotte and Robin L’Houmeau. Macha Grenon plays Masha Cohen, Leonard’s mother, an artist who left music and spirituality, like depression, as a legacy to her son. “I wanted to begin the work by listening to sacred songs. The relationship with music came a lot from the mother,” she says. “I wanted to know her story. I was very touched. She is a Lithuanian immigrant who arrived here at the age of 21, as we learn in the story. Very quickly, she lost her husband, she raised the children, she took care of the grandfather who was in cognitive decline. She spoke French and English, she made sure her children were bilingual.” In the story, she embodies tradition. Mother worried about her son’s dizzying depressive states “she wanted him to get married, so that he would not be alone.”
The soundtrack for the film is provided by Patrick Watson, who worked on Cohen’s last album. You Want It Darker. “When I was young, I didn’t like Leonard Cohen,” the musician says. “But I understood his sense of humor during an interview he gave. It led me to hear him completely differently and I fell in love with him.” The series does not fail to highlight the poet’s memorable witticisms. “God is my great friend,” he says, for example. “And the devil is God too, but when he’s drunk.”