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So Long, Marianne (2024) ‘Series Mania’ Review: The love that stays is the grounding force that underpins the new biographical series on the legendary Leonard Cohen. Love can be turbulent, messy, unwieldy, and chaotically fragmentary but also hold a centering element that stays constant and obdurate irrespective of circumstance. This emotion in all its overwhelming, unruly, and stubborn glory is the guiding pulse of the series, which serves as our emotional entry point into the central grand romance between Cohen (Alex Wolff) and Marianne Ihlen (Thea Sofie Loch Næss in a compelling performance that slowly grows on the viewer).
With the first two episodes of the Oystein Karlsen-created series premiering in international competition at Series Mania, it interestingly chooses to open by focusing on two other relationships that eventually thread towards Cohen and Ihlen’s. We meet the two in their individual, separate lives before they cross paths. The series begins in 1958. Cohen quits Columbia and returns home to Montreal, obviously to his mother’s disaffection. He confesses his frustration with the American ideas of what defines good and bad writing; therefore, he couldn’t quite gel in with its atmosphere.
University hasn’t been a happy streak for him, further exacerbating his spate of depressive tendencies. He has won an award while abroad but remains generally displeased and sullen. On his mother’s insistence, he gets a job at his uncle’s garment factory. But of course, it’s a space that only snuffs the life out of him. His mentor, Irving Layton, nudges him to try out grants and venture out. While Cohen wanders out in London as he ostensibly carves out a version of him travelling the world in the guise of a ‘closet optimist’, the series also parallelly builds Marianne’s angle of entry into his life. The two episodes are too early to paint the full, wild bloom of the Leonard-Marianne love story but show their first brushes past each other.
She has a partner, incidentally also a writer, Axel (Jonas Strand Gravli), who emboldens her to escape the mundanity of small-town life and set out to explore the world. As much as she loves him with clenched vigor, it is quickly established he’s the philandering kind who cannot quite keep himself bound to the strictures of a settled, properly delineated family life. He cannot keep his hands off any young woman who catches his fancy the minute he gets to sneak out from under Marianne’s notice.
It isn’t that she is wholly oblivious to his inclinations, but she has built a life that is pivoted so much around him that she cannot dare to break it. The couple lands on the Greek island of Hydra, which is depicted as a sort of haven for broke artists struggling and waiting for their big break. There’s the longtime local originally from Australia, Charmian (a superb, scene-stealing Anna Torv), who seems to take every new resident under her wing and ease them into the island’s lifestyle and social circles. She lives with her much older husband, George (Noah Taylor), and their kids, although she seems to be mostly found at the bar.
The two episodes capture the mounting friction in Marianne’s marriage as Axel continues to be reckless and remove himself from their relationship both socially and emotionally. On the island. Marianne frequently stumbles across Cohen, who arrives on the recommendation of a Londoner who promised happiness in Hydra but haplessly keeps faith in Axel to mend his manners and return to her side as an active, interested emotional partner. However, Axel keeps disappointing her, staying absent and flighty even after Marianne becomes a mother. She had pegged her hopes on his improvement with them turning parents, but to no avail. She’s left flailing.
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Hopping six months later in the second episode, the series takes us on a tour of their stormy marriage, his eroding interest in her, and her acute helplessness in losing her only anchor. In a scene remarkably performed by Torv, Charm urges Marianne to seize agency, warning her how muses, when they age, start to fade. The words are a quiet wake-up call to Marianne as she registers her defiance and is thereby confronted with how Axel actually perceives her.
While the performances are sincere, the production feels tawdry at times, often drumming similar narrative notes but without mining them in a deepening manner. Although my judgment is based on just two episodes, the writing lacks cohesiveness and blunderingly opts for an explicatory, verbose mode of describing Cohen’s depressive swings. He talks of it as a mental violence that goes on and on and makes it hard for him to jump from one day to the next, ‘lurking like a great blanket.’ He calls himself a misery magnet.
While Wolff has visibly worked at the accent and brings a loose-limbed quality that distracts us from strains of effort in his performance, the two episodes don’t let us fully into his vacillating moods. Besides a painfully uninspired use of monochrome for certain scenes, the series especially fumbles to get a grip on transitions and decisive moments of change, which is why the emotion doesn’t translate successfully. In one scene, Cohen opens up on how he feels broken, confessing he is scared of failure. I hope the remaining episodes allow a more expansive, considered peek into these fears and his fledgling inner world.
