The love story between Leonard Cohen and Marianne, his famous muse and ex-girlfriend, will be the subject of a TV series, a Quebec-Greece-Norway co-production for the video-on-demand service Crave which will be partly shot in Montreal next summer.
Entitled So Long, Marianne, in reference to the 1967 success of the poet and singer-songwriter from Montreal, the series will feature American comedian and musician Alex Wolff, who was seen at the cinema in Patriots Day (2016 ), Hereditary (2018) and Old (2021) by M. Night Shyamalan. Later in the summer, he will appear in the credits of Oppenheimer, the new blockbuster from Dunkirk and Inception filmmaker Christopher Nolan.
The role of Marianne Ihlen will be defended by Norwegian actress Thea Sofie Loch Næss (Polaroid, The Last Kingdom).
Britain’s Noah Taylor (Game of Thrones, Peaky Blinders) and Australia’s Anna Torv (The Last of Us, Mindhunter) will star the bohemian writer couple George Johnston and Charmian Lift, who hosted Leonard Cohen and Marianne at Hydra, in Greece during the 1960s. On this island in the Saronic Gulf, located south of Athens, the two lovebirds discovered a new world of free love, drugs and artistic expression.
According to Bell Media’s General Manager of Fiction, Sophie Parizeau, So Long, Marianne will paint an intimate portrait of two lonely beings who fall in love as they try to understand “their place in the universe”.
Quebec actors will join the distribution of the biographical drama in eight episodes, we are informed. However, the casting is not complete.
Behind the camera, we can confirm the participation of director of photography Ronald Plante (Good cop, bad cop 2, Sharp Objects) and Véronique Barbe, editor on several Jean-Marc Vallée projects, including Big Little Lies.
So Long, Marianne is already under construction. Filming began on March 24 in Oslo, Norway. They will come to Montreal in August. A few days in New York are also planned. In the meantime, the team will deploy to Greece, where the bulk of the action will take place.
“Hydra is a mythical place,” says Sophie Parizeau. The images that we will be able to make are something. »
Since part of the scenario took place in Montreal, a Canadian partner was in order, and Bell Media, which owns the Crave platform, joined the group. So Long, Marianne is the result of the association between Redpoint Productions (Norway), Tanweer (Greece) and Connect3 Media, the Quebec box behind Sugar, the film from Amazon studios about the two Quebec influencers arrested for cocaine trafficking in Australia.
So Long, Marianne, which is expected on Crave in 2024, is part of Bell Media’s desire to offer more and more international co-productions, a genre that has not always had a good reputation, due to the many tasteless films or series that resulted from such collaborations.
“I think we’ve gone somewhere else,” says Sophie Parizeau. Streaming platforms have proven it to us. International co-productions are no longer what they once were. »
Spoiler alert for those unaware of Leonard Cohen and Marianne’s story: Their union didn’t last, but they did stick together. They both died of leukemia a few months apart in 2016.
Besides So Long, Marianne, several songs from Cohen’s first two albums, released in 1967 and 1969, are directly inspired by her, including Bird on the Wire, Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.
