LC in Ottawa Citizen

[Bob Parkins]

Shudda (wudda cudda) filed these earlier. Anyway:

Byline: John Griffin
Outlet: The Ottawa Citizen
Headline: Cohen's self-insights add lustre to brilliant tribute movie
Date: Friday 28 July 2006

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man Documentary **** 1/2

Starring: Leonard Cohen

Directed by: Lian Lunsen

Rated: 14A

Playing at: ByTowne Cinema, through Monday

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Mere months after the release of the epochal Neil Young: Heart of Gold comes Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man, the next-best concert movie in decades.

Australian documentary filmmaker Lian Lunson's gracefully impressionistic portrait of the great Montreal poet, musician and novelist unfolds around a tribute show at the Sydney Opera House last year. Organized by visionary producer/collaborator Hal Willner (Amarcord Nino Rota, Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill), the event brought together card-carrying Cohen acolytes like Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Antony, Jarvis Cocker, Linda and Teddy Thompson, and fellow Montrealers, the redoubtable McGarrigle/Wainwright clan -- Kate, Anna, Rufus and Martha -- to perform material spanning almost four decades. Not to be left out, members of U2 convince the man who says he can hardly carry a tune to join them for a swinging version of Tower of Song recorded in New York's velvet-swagged cat house, the Slipper Room. Cohen has seldom croaked to better effect.

In Sydney, Australian native son Cave kicks things off with a rousing version of I'm Your Man; Rufus and family nail the sardonic Everybody Knows; the androgynous, dangerously talented Antony turns If It Be Your Will into gospel testimony; and Linda Thompson joins alt-country's the Handsome Family for a luminous version of the swoony ballad 1000 Kisses Deep.

Other highlights include Rufus's unmade-bed take of a Cohen "indiscretion" with Janis Joplin called Chelsea Hotel #2; Teddy Thompson's sweet tenor on Tonight Will Be Fine; Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker's brash Death of a Ladies Man; Cave's interpretation of Suzanne, the classic that made Cohen's reputation in the mid-1960s; and the Wainwrights plainsong version of Hallelujah, a modern hymn for the ages.

Cave, Bono, Edge, the McGarrigles and the Wainwright kids (Rufus's description of meeting the legend for the first time is priceless) all cast light on a shadowy figure. But it is Cohen who opens a crack in the door to a life spent seeking truth in beauty. Over two months of interviews in his Los Angeles home, and for the first time in 12 years, he talks about himself and the universe he inhabits. Painstakingly clinical in self-analysis, with Zen awareness and Zen mirth, Cohen reflects on his childhood in Montreal, on the late '50s explosion of Beat poetics, on the creation of his songs, his spiritual struggles, and the decision in the 1990s to loosen ties with the material world for Buddhist life atop California's Mt. Baldy.

His observations are penetrating, articulate, amusing and quick to deflate what may remain of his own ego. Lunson supports these reflections of a lifetime with archival footage, unfussy atmospherics and Cohen voice-overs, neatly suspended in the middle of concert songs. They do nothing to detract from the power of pop culture's unlikely moral centre, and one of its very greatest artists.

**
Plus which:

Byline: Katherine Monk
Outlet: The Ottawa Citizen
Headline: Filmmaker took extra interest in subject: Lunson, singer Cohen became 'good friends' during filming
Date: Thursday 27 July 2006

Filmmaker Lian Lunson says she and Leonard Cohen became "good friends" over the course of shooting a documentary focused on the life, times and legacy of the gravel-voiced troubadour.

She says she and Cohen would spend hours drinking wine and preparing dinners. They would exchange ideas and artsy conversation. They laughed, they dined, and they developed a type of intimacy reserved for creative collaborations. Whether that intimacy evolved into anything more, well, intimate remains a mystery that Lunson guards carefully behind her long, platinum locks and kohl-lined eyes.

"I love spending time with Leonard," says Lunson. "We like a lot of the same things. Our sensibilities are quite similar. But it wasn't something I took for granted. It was a huge privilege sharing time with him.

"All I can tell you is that we became very good friends."

Speaking about her documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, where Leonard Cohen, I'm Your Man had its international premiere, Lunson was still clearly elated about her time with Cohen, the poetic storyteller known for penning such dirge-like classics as Suzanne and Sisters of Mercy.

"The only thing I discovered about him that I didn't already know before was just how kind he was," says Lunson. "He's such a caring man. He's just a fantastically caring and honest person."

Lunson says she was a little apprehensive before she started. She didn't want to find out her teenage idol wasn't the man she was expecting. As it turned out, he was much, much more than she could have imagined.

"When you get to know someone as a person, beyond their persona, and they actually become more interesting and more admirable, then you have to consider yourself very lucky, and I do. Leonard is a very great, great man."

Lunson does not disguise her glowing admiration of Cohen. She's a huge fan and has been since she first listened to his records growing up in Australia.

"I listened to his music over and over again. I can't say which songs were real favourites. It was the whole experience of listening to his music and getting into the imagery. I think as a young woman, it really had an effect on me. I was tremendously moved by his words and music and felt that I could relate to the emotions he was putting out there."

After several years as an actress, Lunson abandoned work in front of the camera to learn production. She moved to Los Angeles to produce music videos for Neil Young, INXS, Pearl Jam and Public Enemy.

In 1997, she formed a production company called Horse Pictures, and began directing more personal projects, such as a documentary on country music's counter-culture icon, Willie Nelson. The film did well, and eventually paved the way for Leonard Cohen, I'm Your Man.

Lunson was certainly not the first filmmaker to approach Cohen about a biopic, but she was the first to succeed. Part of that success can be credited to her earlier work, and her ability to show the essence of a human being by capturing the context of their larger life on screen.

Lunson says she never asked Cohen why he said yes to her when he turned so many others away, but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure it out.

Cohen has always been a ladies' man, and when you look at the blond Aussie in her tight black hipster clothes, the pieces of the puzzle magically fall into place.

"I had two intentions when I started out," Lunson says. "The first was to film Leonard Cohen performing. I really wanted to show him in concert and make it a tremendous event. The second goal was more of a dream: To share as much time with Leonard as possible, and get him together with people like U2 and all the others he's influenced along the way."

As a director, Lunson says her only duty to the subject is to pull back and not get in the way, and as an Australian, she says that's an almost natural reflex.

"Australia and Canada are a lot alike -- and we're also very different. But I definitely felt a connection to all the Canadians I met because we don't insist on dominating the discussion. We're good listeners, and I think that's why we gravitate so naturally to documentary."

When the artists aren't speaking to Lunson's camera, they are singing on stage as part of a tribute show the director staged in Sydney for the movie. Featured acts included fellow Canucks Rufus Wainwright and the McGarrigle sisters, and Beth Orton and Nick Cave.

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All for now. . . .