Broken English: meta Marianne Faithfull doc is a heartbreaking document of her final performance

A man in a long grey overcoat and 1950s fedora arrives at an archival facility. He is the Record Officer, and shortly he will conduct an interview – he is the actor George MacKay, dressed up like a noir detective. This flourish is a way for directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard to announce their intentions, as nonfiction filmmakers whose project is distinct from reportage. Their documentary Broken English, about the singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull, takes place within a fictional institute called the Ministry of Not Forgetting, which looks like a retro control room, full of dusty files and clunky analogue scanners. Its employees include the Overseer (Tilda Swinton) as well as MacKay’s Record Officer, and its goal, as Swinton’s clipped voiceover states, is “reimagining what it means to preserve cultural legacies”. Forsyth and Pollard refuse to consolidate the record regarding Faithfull, and instead make the choice to skewer it.

Broken English is structured around a sit-down interview with Faithfull, who was 78 at the time of filming (and died before the film was finished). She retains her swagger despite the breathing tube she acquired after suffering from emphysema and Covid. MacKay’s Record Officer plays Faithfull footage of herself on a monitor and offers various prompts. “Do you think you needed darkness to be a great artist?” he asks the singer, who rose to fame as an angelic blonde pop star at 17, and suffered a swift decline into alcoholism, heroin addiction and homelessness in her 20s. “Fuck no!” retorts a spritely Faithfull. “But it’s a good hook to hang things on, isn’t it?” she adds.

The film attempts to offer more context when revisiting the darker moments in Faithfull’s story: the singer’s suicide attempt in 1969, which was preceded by a miscarriage, as well as the stifling of her track ‘Sister Morphine’, a bleak and diaristic account of addiction. The single featuring her original recording of the song, which she also co-wrote, was pulled from the shelves by her record label. When it was rerecorded and re-released by the Rolling Stones, her name was erased from its credits.

“I don’t care for this – I’m not going to go there,” Faithfull tells the Record Officer as they inch closer to a conversation about the drugs bust and subsequent tabloid headline (“Naked Girl at Stones Party”) that became part of the singer’s legacy. Forsyth and Pollard don’t see it as Faithfull’s responsibility to redress this narrative herself, and so they assemble a round table of female commentators, including the feminist art historian Katy Hessel, to “take on subjects that Marianne will not touch, and shouldn’t have to”, as moderator Edith Bowman puts it. It’s a clunky device that ends up being no different from the standard talking-heads model used by many documentaries to provide analysis. The round table conversation about the sexism Faithfull has faced feels cringily didactic, and much less effective than the damning montage of all the male broadcasters who have taken it upon themselves to ask inane questions about her sex life.

Another of the ministry’s employees is seen taking a pen to a whiteboard, scrawling “VIRGINAL, CHILDLIKE, PURE” on one side, and phrases like “ON THE CUSP OF ADULTHOOD” and “PROVOCATIVE” on the other. Forsyth and Pollard cut this with a montage of black-and-white pin-up photos of a teenage Faithfull; the woman writes ‘Marianne’ in the middle of the diagram. Admittedly, the contradictions that Faithfull embodied aren’t easy to dramatise, but the film’s repeated attempts to show its thought process end up oversimplifying it.

Faithfull’s charm lay in her rawness, and the film serves her best in its more stripped back moments. The power of her songs is driven home in footage of other artists singing them. A world-weary Beth Orton performing ‘As Tears Go By’ is particularly devastating, while Courtney Love’s rendition of ‘Times Square’ is almost as caustic as Faithfull’s own. Faithfull herself sings ‘Misunderstanding,’ accompanied by Nick Cave (subject of Forsyth and Pollard’s 2014 film 20,000 Days on Earth) – it is a spooky and heartbreaking document of what ended up being her final performance.

Swinton’s Overseer reminds the audience that “not forgetting” is both different from simply remembering, and a creative, human act. For example, it’s important not to forget Faithfull’s place among (and not just alongside) the folk singers and beat poets who defined the swinging 60s, including Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Joan Baez. Indeed, when presented with footage of herself and Baez performing ‘As Tears Go By’, Faithfull playfully emphasises the fact that we are watching Baez singing her song.

► Broken English is in UK cinemas now.