In hybrid documentary \u201cBroken English,\u201d which premieres in Venice Film Festival\u2019s 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 \u201c20,000 Days on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
The directors took inspiration for the film from Samuel Beckett\u2019s play \u201cKrapp\u2019s Last Tape,\u201d in which an old man sifts through recordings of his younger self. Pollard tells Variety, \u201cWe 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\u2019t ask for a better subject: Who would be more outspoken, who would be more critical and honest, and willing to lay themselves that bare?\u201d<\/p>\n
More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n The film includes myriad archival clips, as well as a roundtable debate, in which commentators assess Faithfull\u2019s life. It also includes fresh renditions of her songs by Courtney Love, Suki Waterhouse, Jehnny Beth and Beth Orton, and Faithfull\u2019s last ever performance as a singer, accompanied by friends and frequent collaborators Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. (Cave, incidentally, was the main protagonist in \u201c20,000 Days on Earth.\u201d)<\/p>\n 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\u2019s production notes as \u201can imagined, cinematic institution where memory and mythology collide.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ministry\u2019s staff is led by the Overseer, played by Tilda Swinton, and the Record Keeper, played by George MacKay. The former serves as \u201cour de-facto narrator, guiding us on our journey through the film,\u201d while the latter is \u201cpart archivist, part psychoanalyst, weaving a new narrative from Marianne\u2019s fractured past.\u201d<\/p>\n Faithfull is best known for the 1964 hit \u201cAs Tears Go By\u201d and her much publicized relationship with Mick Jagger. After a period of heroin addiction in the 1970s, she revived her career with the album \u201cBroken English,\u201d which was nominated for a Grammy Award. She died in January at the age of 78.<\/p>\n In a statement released ahead of the premiere, the directors said the question \u201cWhat truly matters when telling someone\u2019s story?\u201d guides all their work. So, what really matters in the life of Marianne Faithfull?<\/p>\n \u201cBubbling out of me is the work. The work truly matters,\u201d Pollard tells Variety. \u201cAnd you see that in the friends that she made.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The film doesn\u2019t shy away from touching on Faithfull\u2019s more negative traits. \u201cMarianne could be her own worst enemy. No doubt about that,\u201d Forsyth says. \u201cI 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 \u2026 you see it over five, six decades, over and over again. These moments where you\u2019re like, \u2018You weren\u2019t really working in your best interest, Marianne.\u2019 But, she \u2013 for good and bad \u2013 stayed true to herself, and I think that\u2019s what matters.\u201d<\/p>\n Another aspect of Faithfull\u2019s character that comes across in the interviews and clips is that she \u201creally understands the strength of collaboration,\u201d Forsyth says. \u201cIt was something that ended up coming out quite strongly in the film we made with Nick Cave, \u201820,000 Days.\u2019 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\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 a sound, I think,\u201d Pollard says, \u201cbecause she would so often talk about how she could handle the language, she could handle the words, but she couldn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ministry of Not Forgetting was a helpful devise in the interrogation of Faithfull\u2019s life and personality, the directors explain. \u201cThe Ministry inside the film, in a way, is the process of making the film,\u201d Pollard says. \u201cSo, whenever we discovered something that we didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n One of these discoveries was a tape showing Faithfull\u2019s performance in a rehearsal for Kurt Weill\u2019s opera \u201cThe Seven Deadly Sins.\u201d \u201cWe found a press officer who worked with her at that time who tracked down this recording and we decided: We\u2019re not going to tell her we\u2019ve got it. We\u2019ll just show her. It\u2019ll be a really nice moment,\u201d Pollard says. \u201cWe tried to channel the process of making the film, or mirror it in some way, parallel with the construct inside the film.\u201d<\/p>\n The directors\u2019 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. \u201cWe are near the thin line between acceptable pretentiousness and unacceptable pretentiousness,\u201d Pollard says with a laugh. \u201cPretentiousness in its true literary form is good. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Forsyth adds, \u201cWhen people know that you\u2019ve come from an art rather than a film background, lots of people say to us when they\u2019ve seen a film that we\u2019ve made, thinking that it\u2019s a really good thing, and we\u2019re going to be really thrilled, \u2018It\u2019s really arty.\u2019 Everything in me dies in that moment. The last thing I want to do is make an arty film, because, to me, \u2018arty\u2019 is an artifice. It\u2019s a pretence. It\u2019s a pretension. It\u2019s a reaching for something that you aren\u2019t able to grasp.\u201d<\/p>\n Pollard says, \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n With reference to the influence of \u201cKrapp\u2019s Last Tape,\u201d Pollard comments, \u201cWhen you\u2019re trying to make a portrait of someone, you don\u2019t 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\u2019s watching that. And we really worked hard to film that as carefully as we could because you see so much. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Forsyth adds, \u201cAt a fairly simple level, what \u2018Krapp\u2019s Last Tape\u2019 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\u2019s really at the heart of what we\u2019re 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 \u2026 Maybe it is ultimately the art rather than film background, but it\u2019s the idea that a film can tell a story about a life \u2026 it doesn\u2019t have to be the story.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBroken English\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source uk.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In hybrid documentary \u201cBroken English,\u201d which premieres in Venice Film Festival\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1982602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[356018,356015,356014,340987,356016,356013,356019,356017,333428],"class_list":["post-1982601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-beth-orton","tag-broken-english","tag-jane-pollard","tag-jehnny-beth","tag-krapps-last-tape","tag-marianne-faithfull","tag-ministry","tag-samuel-beckett","tag-venice-film-festival"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\u2018She-Stayed-True-to-Herself-EXCLUSIVE.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1982601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1982602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1982601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1982601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1982601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}