A film by Jane Pollard , Iain Forsyth
With: Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Calvin Demba, Zawe Ashton, Sophia Di Martino, Marianne Faithfull, Suki Waterhouse, Beth Orton, Courtney Love, Jehnny Beth
A survivor, provocateur and true original, Marianne has spent more than six decades defying expectations — releasing over thirty-five albums while constantly reinventing herself. Made with her full involvement, Broken English is an intimate and unflinching exploration of a fractured yet unbreakable life shaped by fame, creativity and relentless public scrutiny.
Our rate: ***
The fourth and final film we saw on the first day of the festival, after an exhausting day. A film we knew little about, having not seen the two filmmakers’ previous works, called Broken English, an obscure (to us, at least) docufiction (or documentary fiction) about Marianne Faithful, whose death, relatively unreported in France, we learned about at the same time as the film… A film that rounded off what promised to be a splendid day, with screenings of Laslo Nemes‘ Orphan and Laura Poitras‘ latest documentary Cover-up, a day that had begun with Valérie Donzelli‘s At work. The film we expected the least from, and by far the one we liked the most that day… Broken English quickly surprises us with its somewhat abstruse conceptual form, inviting us, to the sound of Tilda Swinton’s voice as a TV producer, to follow the genesis of a documentary series that encourages us to record a person in time, to remember them, in particular through documentary and archival research that helps to engrave the guest in everyone’s memory. The process is all the more unsettling as Marianne Faithful very quickly arrives as the first guest, so we, as viewers, follow the genesis of this retrospective program, which is relatively experimental in form, as the producer seeks to define its contours. The result is a kind of rich documentary and musical creation (a quality shared with Laura Poitras’ documentaries) that is highly structured, going back in time with her before following a more thematic storyline, while including intimate and psychoanalytical elements, but which manages to appear unstructured and rock ‘n’ roll, just like Marianne Faithful herself. The process of creating the program rubs off on the entire film, which seems to be created before our eyes like a piece of free jazz, in a form of improvisation based on highly repetitive scales. In addition to archival footage, the documentary features a team that retraces Faithful’s life with her, but also reinterprets and reorchestrates her films with excellent musician friends (Nick Cave, for example). Broken English is undeniably enjoyable to watch, offering the pleasure of rediscovering Faithful‘s work (both musical and cinematographic) and getting to know it better, not to reminisce or remember, but, as the producer (Tilda Swinton) insists, so as not to forget. The latter will catch us in the third third by addressing a virtual audience invited to the same show we are attending, informing us that the end of the program will have to take place without Marianne, the indestructible woman who had survived heroin, alcohol, cancer, and COVID, but who passed away during the filming of Broken English.
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