Though singer-songwriter and countercultural icon Marianne Faithfull died earlier this year, at the age of 78, this witty, provocative, and playfully post-modern docu-bio is sure to keep her indomitable spirit alive. Directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard certainly have experience with rock’n’roll troublemakers — they covered the turbulent life of Nick Cave in their 2014 cult hit 20,000 Days on Earth — but they’re also firmly in tune with the poetic interior lives of artists of any stripe, which is what Broken English explores very well and very movingly. Above all else, it’s a film about a talented woman who just wanted to make her voice heard, and both the British media and the music industry — in the ’60s and even after that, sadly — don’t come out of it very well at all.
The premise sounds ridiculous, and it kind of is, since it takes place in a fictional place called The Ministry of Not Forgetting, where Faithfull is being interviewed by The Record Keeper (George McKay). The Record Keeper is under the watchful eye of The Overseer (Tilda Swinton), and what might seem at first to be a little, well, twee soon becomes a very interesting reflection on the whole notion of what it means to interview celebrities in the first place. For a short while, it looks like AI, but when it beds in, it all makes sense, with McKay perfectly (and presumably, of course, digitally) added in as the master of ceremonies, talking Faithfull through the key periods of her career.
The Record Keeper reports to The Overseer, which is kind of annoying at first, but it does lay out the project and will become important later. “What we’re after is memories,” The Overseer tells The Record Keeper, “but what we’re hoping for is resonance.” As she puts it, the mission is to set the record straight. After rattling off a list of Faithfull’s achievements — 30 or so albums over six decades — The Overseer sighs. “And to the world at large, she’s just Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend. Well, f*ck that.”
To be fair, this may well be where some audiences will enter this story, but it’s not very likely. Most people drawn to this doc won’t be wondering what happened to the teenage schoolgirl who got swept up by The Rolling Stones’s management and given a hit song to sing. They’ll know very well how Faithfull dove into the rock’n’roll lifestyle, became a drug addict and, most implausibly but true, lived on a wall in London’s Soho (“You couldn’t do it now,” she told Time Out in 2016, which was an understatement even then).
Faithfull is asked about all this and proves a very game interviewee in the face of some fantastic archive footage that is shown to her of her beautiful, radical younger self. Sporting the nasal cannula that signifies her reliance on oxygen after a Covid-induced coma, Faithfull gives a candid response to everything, being especially enlightening on her experiences with the Beat Generation, and Allen Ginsberg in particular, plus Bob Dylan and Joan Baez when the former came over to headline at the Albert Hall in the early ’60s. Well, except one thing. Giving The Record Keeper instructions via an earpiece, like something out of a Mission: Impossible movie, The Overseer brings up the elephant in the room. “Is it time for Redlands?” she whispers.
She’s referring to the drug bust that took place at Keith Richards’ Sussex home in 1967, which cemented Faithfull’s place in rock’n’roll notoriety. For once, Faithfull bats away any questions, and if you know the rumors, you’ll know why. “I don’t care for this,” she says. “I’m not gonna go there, you can put it away.” It’s left to a round table of female artists to discuss why Faithfull became the focus of the establishment’s attempts not only to discredit the Stones but to punish Faithfull for a series of very frank and quite political interviews she gave, mostly to the UK’s male-dominated media. Touchingly, Faithfull even defends her then-boyfriend Mick Jagger, who didn’t exactly stand up for her at the time. Or even when her 1969 song Sister Morphine — “My Frankenstein,” she calls it, which is appropriate for its Venice premiere — was an early victim of cancel culture. “I don’t think we were aware of this stuff as you are now,” she says, also describing the one-time bad boy of rock as, to no one’s surprise today, “quite straight”.
As a concept, the film shouldn’t work but somehow it does, and while the framing is a more than a little on the nose, it does hammer home the need to remember what will so very soon be lost if we aren’t watchful. Broken English gives Faithfull the voice she nearly lost to cigarettes, drugs and booze, showing how women — still — are expected to live in the footnotes of rock history. In that way, although she doesn’t talk about Faithfull on camera, it’s significant that Courtney Love — herself a casualty of the exact same world and, quite memorably, a defender of Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks in the ’90s when the latter wasn’t at all fashionable — pops up to sing Faithfull’s 1983 song Times Square.
More importantly than that, though, the film allows Faithfull to come out from the shadows, all the storm clouds that followed her throughout her life, put all that baggage into context and finally be seen. “Do you need darkness to be a great artist?” asks The Record Keeper. “F*ck, NO!” she roars. “But it’s a good hook to hang things on, isn’t it?”
Title: Broken English
Festival: Venice (Out of Competition)
Directors: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
Screenwriters: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard with Ian Martin and additional material by Will Maclean
Cast: Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Calvin Demba, Zawe Ashton, Sophia Di Martino, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Courtney Love
Sales agent: Global Constellation, Cinetic (North America)
Running time: 1 hr 54 mins
