Death of a Ladies’ Man: Nice Try but Alas, Only Leonard Cohen Gets to be Leonard Cohen

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C+

Taking its title from Leonard Cohen’s 1977 Phil Spector-produced album, Matthew Bissonnette’s new feature Death of a Ladies’ Man is a celebration of Cohen’s songs and a showcase for Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, who plays a lecherous poetry professor heading towards his final long goodnight.

Set in Montreal and the west of Ireland, the film is punctuated with fantasy sequences and musical production numbers, inspired and accompanied by Cohen’s songs. Collectively, these segments might work as a video album though the strained whimsy and choppy connecting story undermine it.

We first meet the dishevelled sixty-something Samuel O’Shay (Byrne) as he’s rushing into his house to pick up a forgotten wallet before catching a flight. After entering the house to the blast of Cohen’s “Memories” (a paean to teen lust set to Spector’s ear-ringing Wall of Sound production), he finds his wife Linda (Carolina Bartczak) in flagrante delicto with a hairy young stranger.

Read our interview with Gabriel Byrne and Matthew Bissonnette

The bedside conversation is brisk. She says he’s the one who has been unfaithful many times and demands a divorce. He tells she leave the house by nightfall.

As well as a recently cuckolded lecher and drunk, Samuel has another problem. He sees things that aren’t real. Later that evening, he prepares to watch his gay adult son Layton (Antoine Oliver Pilon) play in a hockey game.

Instead of the national anthem, a young woman singer breaks into “Bird on a Wire” while the hockey players perform a ballet dance. Later, when Samuel returns home, he finds his long-dead father Ben (a nicely grounded Brian Gleeson) sitting in the living room having a smoke.

At the end of a boozy night out, Samuel finds himself reeling along the street, arm in arm with Frankenstein. When he goes to lunch with his elaborately foul-mouthed performance-artist daughter, Josée (Karelle Tremblay), the waitress has the head of a tiger. Only Samuel seems to notice. Is it possibly Halloween?

Eventually, on a friend’s advice, Samuel makes his way to a doctor (Pascale Bussières) who, on a second visit, informs him he has “one of the largest tumours I’ve ever seen” and he’ll die soon. On the positive side, there are no symptoms apart from his visions, including Canada geese firebombing Montreal at night, and an appearance by an angel in a glass ball, who recommends he travel back to his Irish homeland.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Part two of the film finds Samuel in a cliffside cottage in the west of Ireland. After chatting with his dead father about why his mother left them, he manages to fall in love with a much younger French-Canadian model-turned-cashier Charlotte (Jessica Paré) who, naturellement, is reading Cohen’s novel, Beautiful Losers. The improbable Irish sojourn meanders on, including a subplot about Samuel’s violent rivalry with Charlotte’s ex-boyfriend, which may or may not be real and somehow doesn’t much matter.

At the movie’s most reverently kitschy moment, the soundtrack plays Cohen’s “Why Don’t You Try” while Samuel and Charlotte are accompanied by a musical entourage of fur trader, cheerleader, Buddhist monk and the Grim Reaper, who seem to have collectively stepped out of an early 80s rock video.

Ladies’ Man drops us back to Montreal for the third act, where Samuel has an epiphany about his failures as a father while dancing and lip-syncing to Cohen’s sepulchral growl on “Did I Ever Love You?” As a standalone production number, the scene is joyfully silly though Samuel’s turnaround and redemption is too quick to feel earned.

With respect to Cohen’s memory, a sympathetic tale of an aged literary horn-hound is a bit of a difficult sell these days, and as a friend once noted of an earlier adaptation of Cohen’s work, only Leonard Cohen gets to be Leonard Cohen.

To his credit, Byrne doesn’t really do lechery, and he has the skill to provide melancholic counterweight to the film’s pushy cheeriness. Even when ogling a woman across a room over the rim of his glass, his gaze is more melancholic than predatory. You barely buy the character… but you do believe the actor.

Death of a Ladies’ Man. Directed and written by Matthew Bissonnette. Starring Gabriel Byrne, Jessica Paré, Pascale Bussières, Brian Gleeson, Suzanne Clément and Karelle Tremblay. Available March 12 to rent or buy on the Apple TV app/iTunes and other VOD platforms or to rent on VIFF Connect (BC only). The film also opens March 12 in select theatres (Ottawa, Kingston, Regina, Saskatoon and Charlottetown) and throughout the spring in other cities.