“I said I was ready to die recently, and I think I was exaggerating,” said Leonard Cohen with an inscrutable smile towards the end of his charmed life. “I’ve always been into self-dramatisation. In fact, I intend to live forever.”
His immortality is proceeding very nicely indeed. There are murals in Montreal and a bronze statue in Vilnius. There have been interactive exhibitions in New York and lavish biographical TV dramas in Norway. Now, ten years after his death, this documentary of his Montreal memorial tribute concert, lovingly curated by his son Adam finally emerges in the UK.
It was filmed at the Bell Centre in November 2017, precisely one year after Cohen Snr’s death, at the moment, says Adam, when in Jewish tradition, mourning turns to celebration. Performances are intercut with tributes from those who couldn’t attend – notably Bruce Springsteen, recalling his teenage infatuation with “Suzanne”. “I thought it was the most beautiful song I had ever heard!” he grins, as the film cuts to a recording of him crooning through the verses with the Castiles in New Jersey 1967.
The rich archival footage is cannily deployed too, Cohen’s own indelible voice and image woven through the evening like a thread you keep catching sight of, reminding you what the real thing sounded like. There’s a typically stylish portrait projected high on the backdrop, as though Leonard is wryly observing proceedings from his own cell in the Tower of Song.
In fact, the performance of that particular song, assembled from clips from those who couldn’t make it to Montreal, encapsulates something of the film’s mad variety. The spotlight beam shines down on his trusty Yamaha keyboard, the dinky presets kicking in, even though there’s no one left to hit them. The massed ranks of the Shaar Hashomayim Choir, Cohen’s own Montreal synagogue, sing devoutly “I ache in the places where I used to play”. Suddenly they are joined by the lonesome voice of Willie Nelson: “I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get? Hank Williams hasn’t answered me yet.”
Willie is followed by Céline Dion, inexplicably catching the vibe of Bob Dylan circa Rolling Thunder, and singing convincingly of the curse of being “born with the gift of a golden voice”. Then there’s Peter Gabriel, telling how “they don’t let women kill you in the Tower of Song”. Gamely bringing up the rear is Chris Martin, swinging his arms as though he’s paddled out of his depth, forever like a primary school teacher delivering an assembly in a language he doesn’t have a handle on.
The live performances themselves are a mixed bag. There’s a succession of earnest young men with acoustic guitars, from the Lumineers to BØRNS to Damien Rice, struggling to emerge from the shadow of their master. Elvis Costello shows the young pretenders how it’s done, with a violently original take on “The Future”, emerging from the blues into gospel before building to a stunning string crescendo.
The women generally have a better time of it. The formidable Bettye LaVette wrings something fierce and deeply personal from “In My Secret Life,” turning it into a kind of secular testimony. Courtney Love is the evening’s wildest card. but she pitches “Everybody knows” just right: ragged, knowing, a little dangerous, with a fidelity to the song’s cynicism that some of the evening’s more polished performers don’t quite manage.
Lana Del Rey proves herself to be Leonard’s real heir, ghostly and languid on a duet with Adam echoing down the eternal corridors of “Chelsea Hotel #2”, making the song sound like something she just dreamt up herself.
k.d. lang’s “Hallelujah” is the evening’s centrepiece and its most predictable moment, but predictability is no crime when the performance is this authoritative. She has been singing this song for thirty years and it shows, in the best possible sense: every phrase in its right place, a performance delivered with absolute conviction. From the wings Adam Cohen looks on proudly at a job very well done.