What Crave’s So Long, Marianne got right about Leonard Cohen’s much mythologized on-and-off relationship with his muse | Canada Voices

I had a real on-again, off-again relationship with So Long, Marianne, the limited series about Canadian poet Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian lover Marianne Ihlen that concluded on Crave on Friday.

There were moments where I felt passionately in love with the show and breathlessly awaited our weekly rendezvous.

This was particularly the case in the early days of our courtship. I was heads over heels during the initial episodes set on the Greek island of Hydra – and shot on location in its famously golden light, which made co-stars Alex Wolff and Thea Sofie Loch Naess seem like they were, indeed, in a love story for the ages.

The depiction of the expat community of artists that congregated on Hydra in the 1960s made So Long, Marianne feel like an high-end ensemble drama.

After Marianne escaped her abusive marriage to the cheating Norwegian writer Axel Jensen (Jonas Strand Gravli), father to her son, Axel Jr., Leonard’s courtship of the single mother and the first bloom of their affair was put in contrast with the tortured open marriage of Australian novelists Charmain Clift (Anna Torv) and George Johnston (Noah Taylor).

But then there were the parts of So Long, Marianne that gave me “the ick” – an expression for a sudden turn-off popularized by Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, another show about a relationship between a Jewish man and a gentile woman.

The writing got iffy in the fourth episode; Wolff and Naess’s performances suddenly felt contrived and shallow, respectively. Was this a show I wanted to commit to for the long run?

I took a break; I thought it would be best if I saw other TV dramas for a bit.

But something had seduced me enough to return.

The most off-putting scenes came later on another island, Manhattan, as Cohen pivoted to singer-songwriter in search of fortune and maybe fame.

Lou Reed and Andy Warhol seemed as if they’d stepped out of a Saturday Night Live sketch – and then there was the uncouth decision to show the sex act between Janis Joplin and Leonard that is described in his song Chelsea Hotel #2. It was hard to square these crass caricatures with the deeply human characters met on Hydra.

In between the highs and lows, there were So Long, Marianne’s scenes set on a third island: Montreal.

These were shot in black and white until Marianne showed up with Axel Jr. in response to Leonard’s famous telegram – “Have house, all I need is my woman and her son” – and his hometown burst into colour.

Swedish actor Peter Stormare sounded nothing like the Canadian poet Irving Layton, but he nailed the energy of a toxic artistic mentor who offers encouragement to a young man professionally, but steers him wrong personally.

In the Montreal sequences, cameos were done the right away – with Suzanne Verdal, the subject of Leonard’s song Suzanne, simply dancing at a party, for instance.

And it was a thrill, for McGill University grads at least, to watch a scene actually shot inside Leacock 132 – the site of a reading from the newly published succès de scandale Beautiful Losers.

In the brutalist corridors outside that lecture hall, Layton delivers one of the most amusing meta lines of the show: “You’re too clever for our beloved CBC.”

So Long, Marianne was, of course, co-commissioned by Bell Media’s Crave, not the public broadcaster.

For all its unevenness, the series is at least an attempt to honestly reckon with who this major Canadian cultural figure was – and the conservative/bohemian contraction at the heart of him.

“If Leonard sometimes appeared to court domesticity, he also ran from it,” is how biographer Sylvie Simmons summarized it.

Since Canada prefers to consume stories of its heritage in minutes, naturally it took a European to put together an eight-part series. Oystein Karlsen – showrunner of the Canada-Norwegian-Greek co-production – made a valiant attempt to balance the story of an internationally beloved male artist on the rise with that of the woman who remains best known as his “muse”.

But a better title for the show would have been Leonard’s original one for his song that immortalized their relationship: Come On, Marianne! By the fifth episode, it’s clear that what she wants – a life with Leonard and more children with him – is not what he wants and you just want to yell that at her.

It’s hard to think of a more damning scene than the one where Marianne has had a miscarriage in Montreal – and Leonard shows up at her bedside and starts complaining about not having won a Governor-General’s Literary Award. (Oystein could have made it doubly damning by showing him, later, turning down the GG when he eventually won it.)

It might have been more satisfying to end things after one more episode – but there were three more to go, and many more trips back and forth to Hydra. That ultimately makes So Long, Marianne true to the kind of exhausting on-and-off relationship it depicts, however. I was glad when it was over; I was sorry when it was over.