This Documentary Bids a Bittersweet Goodbye to Marianne Faithfull

British artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard set the record straight with their spellbinding portrait of the inimitable, unflinching singer-songwriter

“That was like open heart surgery,” Marianne Faithfull said to British artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard when they wrapped Broken English, their idiosyncratic documentary on the inimitable singer-songwriter. Faithfull – articulate, imperious and bloody-minded, with the hard-won humour and ravaged voice of a 60s survivor – was never, happily, going to be a grateful or mouldable subject. Even hooked up to an oxygen tank, she’s a clear-eyed and flinty interlocutor not prone to mythologising, least of all herself: “Angel-blonde hair swirling in the wind,” she reads from the florid liner notes of her 1965 debut album. “Well, that’s bullshit.”

With Broken English, Pollard and Forsyth give Faithfull a documentary as unconventional and many-layered as she was. Their premise is the “Ministry of Not Forgetting” – a fictional institution presided over by actors Tilda Swinton and George MacKay, dedicated to untethering Faithfull from the calcified cliches that have clung to her since the 60s, and setting the record straight on her artistry and influence. Through the film’s 99 minutes, they present Faithfull with a wealth of artefacts and footage unearthed from her past, eliciting often revelatory responses, while bringing the resilient musician’s multiple selves into conversation with each other: The daughter of an MI6 agent and an Austrian baroness (descended from Sacher-Masoch no less); the dewy folk singer just emerged from convent school, carrying the Catholic Church’s list of banned books as her North Star; the girl on acid wrapped in Mick Jagger’s rug, destroyed in the tabloids by stories that only amplified the men in her life; the homeless heroin addict haunting a wall in Soho for a decade; the sage resurrected in the 1980s with the spiky, Grammy-nominated new-wave album that gives this documentary its name.

Forsyth and Pollard say they were spurred to act after Faithfull contracted Covid in 2020 and fell into a coma (her second, counting an overdose in Sydney that put her under for six days in 1969). “During that time, Warren Ellis was in isolation working on the music for She Walks in Beauty, the record they were making together,” says Forsyth. “He said to us, ‘I don’t know if she’s ever going to hear this.’ We had this desire for a recalibration of legacy. In the UK, her reputation has been stuck in one moment in the 60s. We all believed a stupid lie about her, and she was never fully recognised as an artist.”

And so, following Faithfull’s recovery, and armed with references from Nick Cave and Ellis (with whom the artists made the slippery, elegiac documentary 20,000 Days on Earth), they approached her with their pitch. “Our core idea was Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, a portrait of an old artist looking back on their life,” says Pollard. “You see a character wrestling with revisiting himself in his younger days. It was this notion of a reckoning, that moment of meeting your past self in a corridor and seeing what that does to you.” 

“We use language often in our art – many of our pieces in the Tate Modern stitch talking heads together,” says Forsyth. “We wanted to do that with Marianne, so we’re seeing her past selves join together and become one voice.”

MacKay was given the formidable task of interviewing Faithfull, wearing an earpiece so the artists could prompt him as he progressed through the touchstones of her life. He makes for a palpably human counterpart to the mass of archive interviews Forsyth and Pollard cut together of various male hosts patronising and dismissing Faithfull over the years: “That section was originally twice the length because there was so much of it, a lot of it creepy and misogynistic,” says Pollard. “You can see in the footage how uncomfortable she is, to the point where her mouth is trembling, but she just keeps coming back at them. She was a survivor. And the thing I’ve recognised in some of the great artists that we’ve had the privilege to work with – Nick Cave, Scott Walker, Gil Scott Heron – is that there’s this incredible forward drive. Marianne had perpetual forward momentum.”

That refusal to be mired in the past made Faithfull beloved of subsequent generations of musicians; in Broken English, a handful step up to cover her songs, including Beth Orton, who taught herself to sing by listening to Faithfull’s records, Jehnny Beth, who tackles her raw, explicit take-down of an ex, Why d’Ya Do It?, and Courtney Love, who immediately asked to cover 1983’s lonely, pain-drenched Times Square: “Courtney was a tricky one, because I think Marianne and Courtney were both absolutely sick to the back teeth of being compared to each other,” says Pollard. “But you can’t not think about the similarity of experience: how Courtney was trapped by the media as this accessory to Kurt, never considered an artist in her own right. All of that baggage was in the room when we shot that. They understood each other.”

But it’s the closer of the film, Faithfull’s rendition of Misunderstanding (from her 2018 album Negative Capability), assisted by Cave and Ellis, that is most moving – it became her final performance. She died last year, at the age of 78, after many years’ service as an eccentric, smoke-wreathed grande dame, holding court in a Montparnasse apartment stacked to the ceiling with books by her beloved decadent Romantics. That last incarnation of hers might have been another role she played, but it was one of her choosing this time, and as illustrated in Broken English, she played it with regal brilliance. 

Broken English by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard is released on Friday 20 March