I watched this after seeing this thread, being old enough to have been to his early concerts and bought a couple of LPs but lost interest after some stories started circulating about him.
But by the end of this documentary I was totally out raged and will never hear his songs with any sympathy what so ever.
What a complete and utter self absorbed arrogant male shit.
And as said above, typical of that time (and probably still now) that a man who makes a huge performance of being a suffering artiste is allowed to behave with total disregard for others, but particularly women.
And all those who colluded with this and enabled his exploitative material.
It wasn't a love story, it was the story of a vulnerable woman fleeing violence fall into a traditional role of unpaid skivvy because she felt she had not real alternatives.
Not one person in the film gave any indication of her character but seem to use her as a blank canvas they projected their ideas onto, even the film maker was doing this, whilst casually letting slip she made him aware of protest music and using film to expose housing conditions.
All those interviewed had totally bought into this suffering male genius cliche and somehow made the women responsible for what happened. eg Suzanne (not given any right of reply) was this predatory monster who took poor hapless Cohen away from Marianne (he didn't even get her name right FFS) and evicted her and young Axel from their home.
This was just one long male wet dream about women who fulfil their feminine essence by dedicating themselves to worthy men. Cohen was in no way feminist as one contributor tried to claim but held moronically outdated ideas about masculine and feminine roles.
I think the loathsome roadie was probably a more accurate reflextion of the life style. He didn't dress it up in contrived artistic sentiments.
I hated that they filmed her near to death. And that (how will this look to the public) message that he sent her.
Even her mother didn't respect her wanting to accept her lot in life as a secretary.
Why didn't the film maker help her find her dreams, instead on helping with the torture of pleasing Cohen, it getting an abortion, dumping young Axel in a boarding school.
And how can anyone idolise an artistic community that put acid in children's drinks, led to one family's total destruction.
A real pity the film maker didn't remove his myth making view point and try and understand why something that seemed on the surface idylic was actually poisonous.
Is it any wonder that in fact the start of the Women's Liberation Movement was not as packaged history puts forward as some sort of university inspired idea, but came from the huge number of women who bought into the hippy dream and very quickly realised it was little more than a men's rights movement where they were mean to provide sex and cups of teas to pretentious men.
Anyway I could rant all night about this, but am truely shocked that in this day and age of supposed more awareness of male destructive behaviour that anyone would think that could dish out this reactionary male myth making.
I can only hope young women growing up today are more clued up that those bought up in the 50s and exploited in the 60s.