At the Beat Film Festival in Moscow, they are showing “Broken English,” a half-fiction, half-documentary film about the icon of “swinging London” of the 1960s, Marianne Faithfull (1946–2025), who in the film, from the point of view Igor Gavrilov, appears as an intellectual leader of his generation.
A “Ministry of Non-Forgetfulness” is opening in England. His goal is to impartially explore people, their memories and inner worlds and to separate fact from fiction. The first subject of research is the singer and actress Marianne Faithfull. An elaborate “Ministry of Un-Forgetting” set was built in the studio pavilion for documentary filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Creating additional dramatic reality for them is a way to talk about their hero, avoiding the boring series of talking heads. In 2014, they filmed Nick Cave for their most famous film, 20,000 Days on Earth. Then they came up with a “day in the life” of Cave during the recording of his album “Push The Sky Away”.
Marianne Faithfull Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard are placed under questioning by a “Ministry” official (George Mackay). The “Minister of Un-Forgetfulness” (Tilda Swinton) monitors the interrogation and examines chronicles, interview tapes and old newspapers using various analogue devices. No modern devices.
The authors clearly hint that they don’t make people like Faithfull anymore, just as they don’t make ebonite telephones and don’t mount tape recordings using blades and tape.
Two more plot lines of the film are the recording of a tribute album and the discussion of Faithfull’s figure by journalists and activists at a round table somewhere in the bowels of the “ministry”. The singer’s personality is put through the millstone of research, forcing her to review her own television interviews, re-read articles in the tabloids and listen to what fellow musicians say about her. The miracle of the heroine is in the calm dignity with which she listens for the hundredth time to all the myths about herself and how far in the past she has left all the scandals and all the pain.
At the time of filming, she had only one pain – a consequence of COVID-19. During her illness, she was in a coma for three weeks. And after leaving the hospital, I learned about the death of a close friend, producer Hal Willner, from the same disease. This pain is stronger than the events of 50 years ago – betrayal, abortion, miscarriages, cancellation and drug addiction. “I was in a coma and he died,” Faithfull says.
The singer actively worked with the authors of the film almost until the very end of filming. She died in January 2025, and in the summer the film was shown at the Venice Film Festival.
Marianne Faithfull has always been characterized primarily as “Mick Jagger’s girl,” almost a groupie, and this despite the fact that both in class and in an intellectual sense she was head and shoulders above him, although younger. It was she who introduced him to the poetry of the beatniks, the ballet of Rudolf Nureyev and “The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, and not vice versa.
Faithfull says she and Anita Pallenberg, another jewel in the Rolling Stones’ necklace, were “at the forefront of women’s liberation.” However, unlike the girls in the commentary booth dissecting the Faithfull phenomenon, she was not a professional feminist. Her love of freedom grew from her upbringing, education, love of art and the calm strength of external perfection. In the late 1980s, she taught songwriting at the School of Disembodied Poetics. Jack Kerouac and told the students: “When you wake up in the morning, when you go to bed, write something.” In the film, the musicians edit a separate track from her lectures.
The film’s soundtrack has not yet been released. The recording included Jenny Beth, Beth Orton, Suki Waterhouse, Thurston Moore, Adrian Utley, and the culmination of the musical part of the film was the song “Times Square” performed by Courtney Love, a figure very close to Faithfull in many respects. The finale is the heartbreaking finale – Marianne Faithfull’s last studio session with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.
