Marianne Faithfull had a singular career in music, so she deserves a singular documentary. But “Broken English,” the doc about Faithfull that premiered on Saturday at the Venice Film Festival, is so singular that it’s likely to be wildly divisive. It certainly was at a Venice press screening late Friday night, which saw a steady stream of walkouts during the film but robust applause from the viewers who stuck around.
Disruptive and distracting, charming and challenging, the film by Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth uses a fictional framework to tell a true story, even as it questions the nature of truth and strips away the usual signposts in a nonfiction film. Tilda Swinton is front and center as the leader of an organization called the Ministry of Not Forgettting; she explains that not forgetting is different from remembering, and then leads an interviewer played by George MacKay (“1917”) through a conversation with the real Marianne Faithfull, who speaks frankly and insightfully about her stormy life and plays along with all the fictional trappings that surround her.
It’s part documentary, part art project, part philosophical treatise, part celebration and part provocation, and Pollard and Forsyth make it deliberately hard to get your bearings at times. A panel of women speak glowingly of Faithfull’s importance and then some of them perform her songs, but what little identification they’re given comes in scribbled notes that might or might not flash on the screen for a couple of seconds. (For the record, they include Beth Orton, Suki Waterhouse, Courtney Love and Jehnny Beth, plus Nick Cave and Warren Ellis for a final performance that includes Faithfull herself.)
The details of Faithfull’s life are laid out in conversations and archival footage which often as not finds the young singer subjected to the appalling sexism of male interviewers who have trouble getting past the fact that she was Mick Jagger’s girlfriend and she later became a heroin addict and tried to commit suicide.
She may be “known as the original rock chick,” as one archival talking head says, but she also had a big hit at 17 with “As Tears Go By”; put out pop and folk albums simultaneously while still a teenager; wrote the scarifying “Sister Morphine” with Jagger (radio recoiled from her version but accepted his); starred as Ophelia in a British version of “Hamlet” that caused her to follow the character’s descent into madness; reinvented herself in the late 1970s with the bold album that gives this film its title; and spent the rest of her life using her ravaged voice to sing rock songs, pop songs, Kurt Weill songs and poetry set to music.
But there’s another story running alongside this one, and it’s the story of the movie’s framing device. At times, “Broken English” seems to be as much about the act of viewing.
When few of her songs receive full performances even if the footage exists, you wonder if all the time devoted to the Ministry of Not Forgetting might not be better spent telling us what we shouldn’t forget about her.
Then again, Faithfull herself does a pretty good job of that, talking about the way she was routinely dismissed as the cute blonde or as Mick’s girlfriend, or about her decades-long drug addiction and alcoholism. When she was in the hospital after her suicide attempt, she says, “I was still reading Edgar Allan Poe and getting a thrill out of my situation.”
But she worked her way out of that darkness when the new wave and punk movements gave her a way to use her voice and made her a godmother of sorts, and she formed an unshakable bond with the late producer Hal Wilner, who led her through some of her deepest musical explorations. “You can’t learn to sing like that,” he says in a clip that is shown to a beaming Faithfull. “This is a voice of a life. A difficult life.”
Both Wilner and Faithfull became deathly ill during the COVID-19 pandemic; Wilner died and Faithfull spent time in a coma before recovering. She eventually died in January of this year, before the film was finished but after she’d had a chance to be filmed performing a new song, “Misunderstanding,” with Cave and Ellis.
In her last-ever recorded performance, she brings the weathered resonance of her voice to lines like “Misunderstanding is my name” and “you only want to f— me up if you can, but I say no,” while Cave supplies ghostly backing vocals and then repeats “only you have such allure” over and over in the song’s coda. The grin on her face as he sings those final lines is beatific, and there’s a twinkle in his eye as he looks at her.
It’s a priceless moment in a film with quite a few of them, even if it’s not always easy to wade through the conceits that entangle the movie. Then again, Marianne Faithfull does not deserve an easy film; she deserves a dark, complicated one like “Broken English.”
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