You wouldn’t call it an elephant in the room necessarily. But for decades, when people talked about Marianne Faithfull, they had a nagging tendency to focus on a single aspect of her life — the one that tended to reduce the singer/songwriter/Swingin’ Sixties icon to a footnote in someone else’s career. Broken English knows this. This documentary on the late, great artist, which made it’s U.S. premiere last night at Sundance after debuting in Venice last year, is well aware that Faithfull’s association with other famous folks too often overshadowed her own accomplishments. So it goes out of its way early on to address this head-on.
“A career spanning six decades,” Tilda Swinton says, sitting at a desk and speaking into a microcassette recorder, “over 30 albums, a vast stream of adoring collaborators, from Paul McCartney to Metallica to the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, a Grammy nomination for [her 1979 album] Broken English, the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres awarded by the French government… She survived overdoses, addictions, cancer, and more recently, a coma brought on by Covid.”
A brief pause. “And yet, to the world at large, she’s still just Mick Jagger’s girlfriend,” she adds. “Well, fuck that.” Fuck that, indeed.
It’s worth noting that Swinton is one of several actors playing employees of the Ministry of Not Forgetting, a fictional institution meant to evoke memories of vintage British bureaucratic organizations of the 20th century; you keep expecting the theme to Brazil to play every time the movie cuts to the cluttered offices inhabited by these clerks. According to Swinton’s nameless administrator, the singer is the ministry’s first subject to receive a deep-dive report. One of her underlings, an eager-beaver new recruit (George MacKay) in the records department, is the case manager. Faithfull herself candidly answers most of his questions — she greets the sight of the infamous “Naked Girl at Stone’s Party” tabloid headline with a curt “I’m not gonna go there” — while dressed in a suit and tie and sporting an oxygen tube in her nose. Occasionally, musicians ranging from Beth Orton to ex-Savages singer Jehnny Beth stop by to perform a song. Trust us when we say that watching Courtney Love and Thurston Moore tear into “Times Square” feels like a gift from the heavens.
Documentarians Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who also gave us the ruminative Nick Cave portrait 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), use this as an elaborate framing device, the sort of oddball choice that doesn’t feel necessary yet also doesn’t detract from the goal at hand. You can see Broken English as a corrective, allowing Faithfull to set numerous records straight and a handful of female artists like Sienna Guillory and Sophie Fiennes to call out the rampant misogyny Marianne faced in the media. (Cue: a damning montage of sexist questions asked by clueless chat-show hosts.) But what it wants to do is give the brightest spotlight to a singular hyphenate who went from honey-voiced ingenue to gravelly éminence grise, Top-of-the-Pops poster child to postpunk cabaret act, cautionary tale to canon-worthy survivor. The woman lived lives, plural.
It’s all here. The first flush of fame with As Tears Go By, still one of the greatest Sixties baroque pop songs of all time. The association with the Stones. Her Zelig-like ability to be everywhere where history was happening, and her friendships with everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Joan Baez (who sings with the teenage Faithfull while Bob Dylan types away in the background in Don’t Look Back). Her marriage to British gallerist John Dunbar, who makes an appearance and affectionately nuzzles with his ex. Her turn onstage as Ophelia in Hamlet opposite Anthony Hopkins, which is where she began experimenting with heroin. The fall, the rise, and the spectacular comeback that was her 1979 masterpiece Broken English — an album of foul-mouthed lyricism and hard-won street romanticism that not only gives the doc its title, but as Faithfull herself said, described her to a tee. The same artist who graced the Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus is also seen reciting poetry and turning Pirate Jenny into the real hero from The Threepenny Opera.
And there’s Faithfull, watching her past paraded before her with a bemused smile and a sense of high irony still intact. No tears go by on Marianne’s part as she reminisces, though you’re a stronger person than we are if you don’t choke up at the documentary’s closing number. Swinton is reading about the necessity for female artists to control their own narratives when she drops her Greek-chorus character and stares directly into the screen. Faithfull died before we could finish this, she says. But she recorded a final performance for the film. We’ve been listening to her comment on her work and watching others interpret her music. Now she’s going to let her voice be heard one last time.
The song is “Misunderstanding.” Her old friends Warren Ellis and Nick Cave are there to accompany her. “Misunderstanding is my name/what I am is not a game,” Faithfull croons. There were already decades of joy and sorrow and rage and acceptance in the way she sung the tune on 2018’s Negative Capability, but it all feels multiplied a hundredfold as she winds through the words now. When she goes up a note at the end of “Such a shame, no way to live/But hard to get away from,” it’s enough to crack you in half. As her collaborators play out the final bars of the song, Faithfull murmurs “Beautiful.” Then she beams and laughs and look around the room, a slight look of wonder on her face, before it cuts to black. What’s been broken feels fixed. So long, Marianne, the film seems to be saying. And thank you.
