In his autobiography, Keith Richards described “As Tears Go By,” a disarmingly simple ballad that he and Mick Jagger composed under duress, as “a terrible piece of tripe.” You can see why, given the potential for treacly overkill in its lullaby-style melody and lyrics about children playing and tears falling. But it’s all in the delivery, and as originally recorded by a then 17-year-old Marianne Faithfull, sentimentality turns to stark, trembling sorrow. Her voice had that effect, of deepening and distressing ordinary words, whether in its pure, flutey teenage form or the sandy, addiction-ravaged rasp it became as she aged. And it has it still — both candidly speaking and finally, magnificently, singing mere months before her death — in “Broken English,” Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard‘s devoted documentary tribute to the iconoclastic British singer-songwriter.
Anyone familiar with Forsyth and Pollard’s filmmaking — including 2014’s moody, BAFTA-nominated Nick Cave portrait “20,000 Days on Earth” and last year’s barely categorizable musical “The Extraordinary Miss Flower” — will know not to expect a standard-issue rock doc from “Broken English,” which premieres out of competition at Venice before traveling on to the Toronto market. After a misleadingly conventional introductory montage of newsreel footage, tracking Faithfull from her ethereal arrival as a folk singer in the 1960s to her supposed downfall the next decade to her weathered comeback, the film sets out its offbeat stall. Tilda Swinton, no less, is ushered in as the austere manager of the Ministry of Not Forgetting, an imagined institution furnished with shadows, dust and analog office fittings, and names Faithfull as her first research project.
“What we’re after is memories, what we’re hoping for is resonance,” says the manager, more or less summing up the aims of every docmaker trawling through the archives as they find the shape of their film. She’s instructing her eager-beaver deputy, played by George MacKay, as he prepares to interrogate Faithfull about her life and career — a contrived fictional setup for what amounts to an unexpectedly matched celebrity-on-celebrity interview, which is all the more surprising for how immediately and palpably the young actor and the septuagenarian musician hit it off. In character or otherwise, MacKay proves a warmly supportive interviewer and a generous listener, and the unguarded, often very funny reflections he draws from Faithfull on herself and the times she’s moved through are the film’s richest asset.
Faithfull certainly remembers an era when she wasn’t treated so kindly in interviews. Well-selected archival material depicts the brazen misogyny that colored how she was spoken of — and spoken to — for much of her career. Faithfull herself turns to the dewy-eyed, infantilizing promotional copy commissioned by the record label for her 1965 debut album: “Angel-blonde hair swirling in the wind,” she reads out, barely suppressing a snort. “Well, that’s bullshit.”
Such purple prose is more complimentary, at least, than the tabloid headlines she inspired when she fell in with the Rolling Stones and the accompanying rock scene, which presented her as little more than an oversexed groupie, devoid of agency and talent — and exploited the widely circulated image of her nude in a fur rug during a police raid at Richards’ estate. One choice montage, cut by editor Luke Clayton Thompson to an escalating froth of fury, shows a procession of mostly male talk-show hosts sanctimoniously badgering Faithfull about her affairs and her drug use. She watches it back with a shrug: “Despite all these stupid people and their stupid questions, I’ve actually had rather a lovely life, so fuck ’em.”
She’s not always so recalcitrant, and can be bluntly self-effacing about her errors and her long battle with substance abuse, poignantly describing addiction as “taking all your rage out on yourself.” When MacKay observes that what she’s been through would have broken many people, she resists self-mythologizing: “Well, maybe it did break me,” she replies.
Her directness and lack of pretense as an interviewer can make some of the film’s devices outside this core conversation look a bit affected and superficial by comparison. A feminist “debate” on Faithfull’s legacy, moderated by British DJ Edith Bowman and filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, amounts to little more than a roundtable love-in, deserved but but not especially analytical, with participants like actor Sienna Guillory and musician Natasha Khan among those offering personal valentines to the legend. Likewise the Ministry of Not Forgetting framework, despite its initial Kafkaesque atmospherics, is little more than a formal distraction, not especially tailored to the film’s subject thematically or stylistically.
What lingers longest from “Broken English,” notwithstanding its playfulness and ambition, are the meat-and-potatoes elements of any good music documentary: not just Faithfull’s tack-sharp presence as an interviewee but a host of vivid musical performances both archival and contemporary. On the latter front, an ace team of musicians, including unrelated composers Rob Ellis and Warren Ellis, accompany several deftly chosen reinterpretations of key Faithfull tracks: Beth Orton sounds exquisitely shattered on “As Tears Go By,” while Courtney Love is compellingly abrasive and dialed-in on “Times Square.”
None, however, can top a climactic and devastating performance by Faithfull herself, sparsely backed by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave, on “Misunderstanding,” a song from her 2018 album “Negative Capability” — her voice at once caressing and cracking on lyrics like “Mistakes are worthless/Misunderstanding’s worse/A game I will not play, a curse.” Faithfull died in January this year, while the film was still in production; the performance was not meant to be her last on record. Knowing its accidental significance, Forsyth and Pollard sensibly end the film there, not bracketing what we’ve just seen in fictional adornments. Faithfull gets the last word in “Broken English,” and the last silence too.
