‘Broken English’ review: Marianne Faithfull’s life explored in inventive documentary with starry cast

Dirs: Jane Pollard, Iain Forsyth. UK. 2025. 99mins

Made with the full collaboration of its subject, the late singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull, during the last years of her life, Broken English is not just a documentary about Faithfull, it’s a film which is fully infused with her distinctive spirit – it is free, candid and rebellious to the core. Faithfull’s involvement in the film skews its focus away from the tabloid-fodder details of her private life and towards her journey as an artist, which is understandable, certainly, but does leave tantalising question marks over sizable chunks of her life. Still, what she gives of herself, she gives with generosity and honesty. It’s a fitting and very affecting tribute.

Suitably maverick and unconventional

Created by artist filmmakers Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth, together with a starry raft of collaborators, the picture shares the creativity of approach and immersive quality of 20,000 Days On Earth, the pair’s Sundance prize-winning film about Nick Cave (who, along with fellow musician Warren Ellis, also appears in this picture). Faithfull’s name and reputation alone should be enough to tempt audiences during and after what is likely to be a healthy festival run (the picture premieres in Venice before going on to screen at TIFF).  

The involvement of talents such as Tilda Swinton, George MacKay and Courtney Love also won’t hurt the picture’s prospects going forward. It’s an interesting contrast to Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill’s Catching Fire: The Story Of Anita Pallenberg, a rather more conventional documentary about an equally smart and influential woman who, like Faithfull, was frequently dismissed as little more than a decorative footnote in the story of the Rolling Stones.

The aim of this suitably maverick and unconventional documentary is not just to excavate the truth, it’s to find something that ‘resonates’. Or so says ‘The Overseer’ (Swinton) of The Ministry For Not Forgetting, a fictional organisation that provides a framing device for this picture-come-art installation. It’s an important clarification, this question of truth and resonance – there are factual truths in the story of this deliberately misunderstood and misrepresented artist, and then there are the spiritual and emotional truths, which, like memories themselves, have a tendency to morph and evolve.

With George MacKay’s Record Keeper as an interviewer (he’s an agile and appreciative inquisitor), a notably frail Faithfull is walked through the extensive archives of her history. She’s visibly moved by some clips of her younger self, but bristles with irritation at some of the more strident newspaper headlines. 

The Ministry For Not Forgetting, atmospherically designed and realised by Alison Dominitz, is an appropriately theatrical device – Faithfull, after all, is a performer who immersed herself in each song like a character to be inhabited. It’s also a device that leans into the tactile, analogue quality of the cultural footprint that Faithfull leaves behind. We leaf through dog-earred and lovingly decorated scrapbooks of cuttings assembled, without her knowledge, by her father. We listen to cassettes, watch tapes get cut and spliced back together. We squirm through prurient and intrusive television chat show interviews, recorded onto scratchy VHS. Faithfull’s legacy, the film suggests, is something that can be touched, something with which we are encouraged to interact or be inspired by.

To this end, the film assembles a panel of women – Edith Bowman, Sophie Fiennes, Sophia Guillory, Katy Hessel, Natasha Khan and Harriet Vyner – to discuss her influence and work. And it invites other musicians, including Beth Orton, the strikingly androgynous Suki Waterhouse, Love, Cave and Ellis, to reinterpret Faithfull’s songs. The most powerful moment, however, is Faithfull herself, half-singing, half-growling ’Misunderstanding’ (from her 2018 album ’Negative Capability’) accompanied by Cave and Ellis, in what turned out to be her final performance.