Marianne Faithfull led different lives and was cast in various roles. Some roles she chose and wrote herself; others were forced upon her, like an ugly hat or an ill-fitting suit. She was the convent girl and the teenage bride, the 60s It girl and the rock star’s girlfriend. She was the pop singer, the folk singer, the tragic addict and the indomitable survivor. Broken English, a flawed but ardent new documentary from Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, effectively arranges all of these incarnations like museum exhibits and invites its subject to review each one in turn – and then smash the glass to set them free.
Faithfull broke the mould, and so it is fitting that the film of her life should do the same, except that Forsyth and Pollard’s main conceit feels jerry-rigged and overdramatised to the point where it risks obscuring our view of the woman herself. We’re ostensibly inside “the Ministry of Not Forgetting”, an institution dedicated to examining truths and myths and the porous line between the two. It’s a defiantly analogue place, stuffed with tape decks and rotary phones, and presided over by Tilda Swinton in the role of a sharp-suited bureaucrat. Faithfull is the project and Swinton its exacting overseer. “We need to take a proper look at Marianne’s role as a destabilising influence,” she says by way of moving the action forward.
Given her formidable reputation, one might imagine that Faithfull would have balked when confronted with this kind of art school posturing, but she seems game enough and graciously consents to be interviewed – very gently, it must be said – by the ministry’s record keeper, who is played by George MacKay. She’s relaxed and charismatic, happy to wander back across her past lives. But her health has been ravaged by emphysema and Covid and she’s vague on some details and unwilling to revisit some others, and has to occasionally pause to insert an oxygen tube. In this way, Broken English catches the legend’s last glow, just before the light went out for good.
The ministry’s project purports to be a dispassionate investigation. In reality, it’s an appreciation, a reclamation, a film that lovingly toasts Faithfull’s fabulous, confounding career. She was the major’s daughter with the cut-glass accent who sang As Tears Go By and wrote the extraordinary Sister Morphine. But she was framed by the press as Mick Jagger’s muse, a good girl gone bad, and suffered through a decade of addiction before her galvanic reinvention. In the late 1970s she engineered a fresh role as a new wave powerhouse, the creator of the tour de force album from which this film takes its name.
Faithfull was inconsistent and capricious, a self-confessed romantic, drawn to beauty and death. But she was also the casualty of a misogynistic culture that refused to acknowledge her as an artist and could barely contain its delight when she stumbled. The film-makers stumble a little themselves at this point by having Zawe Ashton and Sophia Di Martino crop up as an adoring Greek chorus, energetically fulminating on their idol’s behalf. But there’s no ignoring the impact of the archive montage in which a succession of sexist broadcasters excitably grill Faithfull about her celebrity lovers and debilitating drug use. “I was a kid,” she tells one as a way of explaining her missteps. “I didn’t grow up.” And while her later incarnation as the art scene’s weathered Mother Courage arguably risked replacing one cliche with another, here at last was one that she had scripted herself and could wholly lean into.
Forsyth and Pollard were responsible for the fine Nick Cave documentary 20,000 Days on Earth back in 2014. Cave makes a late appearance here as well, rolling into the ministry to assist on what would prove to be Faithfull’s final performance, filmed shortly before her death in January of this year. After all the fussy bells and whistles – the elaborate setup, the constraining conceit – it’s only right and proper that Faithfull should be allowed the last word. Appropriate, too, that she should go out with a song.
• Broken English screened at the Venice film festival.
