In hybrid documentary “Broken English,” which premieres in Venice Film Festival’s Out of Competition section, filmmakers Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth deliver an innovative and playful portrait of the singer-songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull. Variety debuts a first-look clip from the film, and speaks to the directors, who were BAFTA nominated for their Sundance award-winning “20,000 Days on Earth.”
The directors took inspiration for the film from Samuel Beckett’s play “Krapp’s Last Tape,” in which an old man sifts through recordings of his younger self. Pollard tells Variety, “We have, for a long time, had a bit of a yearning to make a portrait of somebody near the end of their life, looking all the way back. With Marianne, you couldn’t ask for a better subject: Who would be more outspoken, who would be more critical and honest, and willing to lay themselves that bare?”
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The film includes myriad archival clips, as well as a roundtable debate, in which commentators assess Faithfull’s life. It also includes fresh renditions of her songs by Courtney Love, Suki Waterhouse, Jehnny Beth and Beth Orton, and Faithfull’s last ever performance as a singer, accompanied by friends and frequent collaborators Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. (Cave, incidentally, was the main protagonist in “20,000 Days on Earth.”)
The film is built around unscripted interviews with Faithfull conducted in a TV studio, which is, we are told, the home of the Ministry of Not Forgetting. This fictitious organization is described in the film’s production notes as “an imagined, cinematic institution where memory and mythology collide.”
The Ministry’s staff is led by the Overseer, played by Tilda Swinton, and the Record Keeper, played by George MacKay. The former serves as “our de-facto narrator, guiding us on our journey through the film,” while the latter is “part archivist, part psychoanalyst, weaving a new narrative from Marianne’s fractured past.”
Faithfull is best known for the 1964 hit “As Tears Go By” and her much publicized relationship with Mick Jagger. After a period of heroin addiction in the 1970s, she revived her career with the album “Broken English,” which was nominated for a Grammy Award. She died in January at the age of 78.
In a statement released ahead of the premiere, the directors said the question “What truly matters when telling someone’s story?” guides all their work. So, what really matters in the life of Marianne Faithfull?
“Bubbling out of me is the work. The work truly matters,” Pollard tells Variety. “And you see that in the friends that she made.” Her friends and collaborators included a diverse group, from Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs in the 1960s, to David Bowie, Brian Eno and Lou Reed later in her life.
The film doesn’t shy away from touching on Faithfull’s more negative traits. “Marianne could be her own worst enemy. No doubt about that,” Forsyth says. “I guess self-sabotage would be the lazy way of describing it. Her ability to stick a pin in an opportunity, or to not see the opportunity in something … you see it over five, six decades, over and over again. These moments where you’re like, ‘You weren’t really working in your best interest, Marianne.’ But, she – for good and bad – stayed true to herself, and I think that’s what matters.”
Another aspect of Faithfull’s character that comes across in the interviews and clips is that she “really understands the strength of collaboration,” Forsyth says. “It was something that ended up coming out quite strongly in the film we made with Nick Cave, ‘20,000 Days.’ Through that film, we began to really understand how important those creative relationships were to Nick, and to Marianne, I would say, possibly even more so. Her creativity needed a sounding board…”
“… a sound, I think,” Pollard says, “because she would so often talk about how she could handle the language, she could handle the words, but she couldn’t write the music. She could think and feel and sing a tune, but she needed somebody else to be with her through all of that creative process.”
The Ministry of Not Forgetting was a helpful devise in the interrogation of Faithfull’s life and personality, the directors explain. “The Ministry inside the film, in a way, is the process of making the film,” Pollard says. “So, whenever we discovered something that we didn’t know, it became something that the Ministry had to uncover in the process of their investigation. We just gave it all of our problems and discoveries.”
One of these discoveries was a tape showing Faithfull’s performance in a rehearsal for Kurt Weill’s opera “The Seven Deadly Sins.” “We found a press officer who worked with her at that time who tracked down this recording and we decided: We’re not going to tell her we’ve got it. We’ll just show her. It’ll be a really nice moment,” Pollard says. “We tried to channel the process of making the film, or mirror it in some way, parallel with the construct inside the film.”
The directors’ background is in the visual arts and they are aware that their creatively adventurous approach to the documentary could elicit ridicule if taken too far. “We are near the thin line between acceptable pretentiousness and unacceptable pretentiousness,” Pollard says with a laugh. “Pretentiousness in its true literary form is good. It’s useful. You can smuggle great truths in using it, but it is a fine line, and on the other side is a lot of wincing.”
Forsyth adds, “When people know that you’ve come from an art rather than a film background, lots of people say to us when they’ve seen a film that we’ve made, thinking that it’s a really good thing, and we’re going to be really thrilled, ‘It’s really arty.’ Everything in me dies in that moment. The last thing I want to do is make an arty film, because, to me, ‘arty’ is an artifice. It’s a pretence. It’s a pretension. It’s a reaching for something that you aren’t able to grasp.”
Pollard says, “But a good idea, a solid, good, well-constructed, artificial Trojan Horse, like the Ministry, can carry through a whole load of stuff into a film.”
With reference to the influence of “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Pollard comments, “When you’re trying to make a portrait of someone, you don’t just have access to the version they are now, you have access to a whole load of recordings. That means you can draw on them at other points in time. And what I love about the Beckett play is that sense of being in the moment, of watching somebody listen to themselves 30 years ago, and I think that we had this feeling in those first scenes we did with Marianne that we would learn a lot just by watching her watch herself. It is almost beyond what she says about that. Just her face, just seeing what happens as she’s watching that. And we really worked hard to film that as carefully as we could because you see so much. It’s that idea of the self at different times across a life, and a piece of art, a piece of theater, a piece of film, that brings multiple selves into one monologue.”
Forsyth adds, “At a fairly simple level, what ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ is is a portrait of the character Krapp, rather than a biography of the character Krapp. And I think with all of these kinds of film projects, what’s really at the heart of what we’re driving at is finding a way to not make a biographical documentary, not tell a life story from cradle to grave, but to find a way of portraying these people … Maybe it is ultimately the art rather than film background, but it’s the idea that a film can tell a story about a life … it doesn’t have to be the story.”
“Broken English” is produced by Beth Earl. The script is by Forsyth, Pollard and Ian Martin. Cinematography is by Daniel Landin, production design is by Alison Dominitz, the editor is Luke Clayton Thompson, and costume design is by Jerry Stafford.
It is a Rustic Canyon and Phantoscopic production in association with Magna, Globe Originals, Q&A Entertainment and Cold Iron Pictures. Global Constellation is handling worldwide sales.
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