Return engagement! “The Greek island of Hydra was Eden for a group of 1960s free-love artists and intellectuals who flocked to an idyllic paradise with sun-dappled beaches, cheap living and plentiful mind-expanding drugs to turn on, tune in, drop out.
“One of them was a struggling writer who had yet to discover his gift for music, Leonard Cohen. Another was a Norwegian divorcee fleeing a toxic relationship, Marianne Ihlen. Their love affair, seemingly perfect while on the island but troubled and complicated when cast out of paradise, morphed into a friendship that survived on and off for decades, until their deaths — three months apart — in 2016.
“The extraordinary story of an artist and his muse is told with affection and sympathy by the British documentarian Nick Broomfield in Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love. Broomfield not only knew them both, he spent time on Hydra and was briefly a lover of Ihlen himself.
“But Broomfield wisely only allows himself to be a tangential figure, instead focusing on the enigmatic wanderer Cohen and the complicated single mother Ihlen. Helping tell the story is a wealth of archival material, including footage shot on Hydra. It is indeed an alluring destination.” - San Francisco Chronicle