Dir.
Lian Lunson, US, 2005, 103mins
Cast: Leonard Cohen, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright
Review by Carol Allen
The songs of Leonard
Cohen were part of the musical background to young people's
lives in the 70s, particularly after they were
used on the soundtrack of the late Robert
Altman's 1971 film McCabe and Mrs Miller.
There was something about his contemplatively
poetic and downbeat world view, which appealed
to the times. Lunson's film is a documentary
appreciation of Cohen and his work, mixing
footage of a tribute concert in Sydney, Australia
in January 2005 with interview material from
the man himself, his colleagues and his friends.
And while a tribute concert is all very well,
nothing matches Cohen's gloriously gravelly
tones over the opening sequence with “Waiting
for the Miracle”, “Tower of Song” towards
the end and his own version of “I'm
Your Man”. There are also some excellent performances
during the lavish concert footage. The
slightly satanic looking Nick Cave, who
made his impressive directing debut recently
with the Australian Western The Proposition,
does a great up tempo version of “I'm
Your Man” and “Suzanne”;
and tells an amusing anecdote remembering
his first encounter with Cohen's music
in his Australian outback youth and suddenly “feeling
like the coolest person in the world, because
it separated me from everyone and everything
I detested”.
Other notable musical
contributions come from Rufus Wainwright
(“Everybody
Knows” and “Chelsea Hotel”)
and Jarvis Cocker (“I Can't Forget”),
while Bono and Edge from U2, who didn't
take part in the Sydney concert but are
firm Cohen fans, chip in with their words
of appreciation and join Cohen for a New
York club performance of the aforementioned “Tower
of Song”.
In its ambition to show what makes Cohen
tick as a man however, the film has more
limited success. There are some affectionate
reminiscences from friends, such as Wainwright
remembering his first meeting with Cohen,
who was in his underwear, cooking noodles
and feeding bits of sausage on a toothpick
to revive a baby bird. The home movies
of Cohen as a child and archive of him
as a young performer looking a bit like
a young Dustin Hoffman are interesting
too.
The interview material
of Cohen himself is somewhat disappointing
however. Now 71, he has a strong, somewhat
leonine face, which bears witness to
a full life well lived, but the technique
used for shooting him is distracting.
He is largely filmed in such close up
it is difficult to get any sense of the
whole man or his body language. When
you do get a glimpse of him in wider
shot, it is photographed in an unnecessarily
fidgety and fuzzy black and white, all
of which distracts from what he is saying.
Which is a pity as he is well worth listening
to” “My
reputation as a ladies' man was a joke.
It caused me to laugh bitterly the 10,000
nights I spent alone.”
A Montreal Jew by
birth, he recalls his first encounter
with poetry in the Jewish liturgy of
the synagogue and his more recent experiences
in the 90s with a Japanese Zen master.
He makes statements which from anyone
else might sound pretentious, but here
they are grounded by his self-mocking
delivery. And while the contributors to
the film praise him highly for his poetry
and musicianship, Cohen sums himself up
thus: "I had the title poet, and maybe
I was one for a while. Also the title singer
was kindly accorded me, even though I could
barely carry a tune."
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