The hybrid documentary “Broken English” premieres in the competition section of the Venice Film Festival, with filmmakers Jane Pollard and Ian Forsyth offering innovative and playful portraits of singer-songwriter and actress Marianne Faithful. Variety debuted a clip of the film’s first appearance and speaks to the Sundance Award-winning director, nominated for “20,000 Days on Earth.”
The director took the film’s inspiration from Samuel Beckett’s play, “The Last Tape of Clap.” There, an old man sifted through a recording of his young self. Pollard talks to variety. “For a long time, we wanted to make a portrait of someone near the end of our lives and go backwards. We couldn’t seek a better theme with Marianne.
The film includes countless archive clips and a roundtable where commentators evaluate Faithful’s life. It also includes fresh productions of her songs by Courtney Love, Suki Waterhouse, Jenny Beth and Beth Orton, as well as Faisful’s final performance as a singer with friends and frequent collaborators Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. (Come to this, the cave was the main character of “20,000 Days on Earth.”
The film is built around faithful interviews held in a television studio. This fictional organization is described in the film’s production notes as “an imaginary cinema system where memories and myths collide.”
Jane Pollard and Ian Forsyth, directors of “Broken English.”
Courtesy of Paul Hartfield
The department’s staff is led by a supervisor played by Tilda Swinton and a record manager played by George Mackay. The former serves as “our factory narrator and guides the cinema journey,” while the latter “is part of some archivists, psychoanalysts, weaves new stories from Marianne’s broken past.”
Faithfull is best known for his highly publicized relationship with Mick Jagger from 1964’s hit “As Tears Go by.” After a period of heroin addiction in the 1970s, she revived her career with the Grammy-nominated album, “Broken English.” She passed away in January at the age of 78.
In a statement released ahead of the premiere, the director asked, “What is really important when talking about someone?” We’ll guide you through all your work. So, what is really important in Marianne Faithful’s life?
“The bubbles up from me are work. Work is really important,” Pollard tells Variety. “And you see it in the friends she made.” Her friends and collaborators included a diverse group, ranging from Allen Ginsberg and William Burrows in the 1960s to David Bowie, Brian Eno and Lou Reid later in life.
The film is not embarrassed to be exposed to Faithfull’s more negative traits. “Marianne could be her own worst enemy, and there’s no doubt about that,” Forsyth says. “I think self-fatigue is a lazy way to explain it. Don’t see the opportunity for her ability to stick pins on her occasion, or anything… you’ll see it over and over for over five or sixty years. But she remains true to herself, for good and evil, and I think it’s important.”
Another aspect of the follower character you come across in interviews and clips is that she “really understands the strength of collaboration,” says Forsyth. “It came out very strongly in the film we made with Nick Cave, “20,000 Days.” “Through the film, we really began to realize how important those creative relationships are to Nick.
“…I think it’s the sound,” says Pollard. “Because she could work with language, how she could handle language, but she couldn’t write music. She could think, feel, sing the song, but she had to be with her throughout the entire creative process.”
The unforgettable ministry was a useful in interrogating the lives and personality of followers, the director explains. “In a way, the ministry within a film is the process of making a film,” says Pollard. “So whenever we discovered something that we didn’t know, it became something the Ministry had to reveal in the course of their investigation. We gave it all the problems and discoveries.”
One of these findings was a tape showing Fachfull’s performance in the rehearsal for Kurt Weill’s Opera “The Seven Deadly Sins.” “We found a spokesman who worked with her who tracked this recording. We’re not going to tell her what we have. We’ll show her. It’s a really great moment,” says Pollard. “We either steered the process of making a film or tried in some way in parallel with the structure within the film.”
The director’s background lies in visual arts, recognizing that if his creatively adventurous approach to documentaries goes too far, he can bring out ridiculous laughs. “We’re near the thin line between acceptable and unacceptable exaggeration,” Pollard says with a laugh. “The exaggeration in true literary forms is good. It’s convenient. You can smuggle big truths when using it, but it’s a fine line and can flinch a lot on the other side.”
Forsyth replies, “When people know you come from art, not from film background, a lot of people say to us when we see a film we made. The last thing I want to do is, for me, “artistic” is artistic.
“But a good idea, a solid, good, well constructed, artificial Trojan horse, like a ministry, can bring a lot of things into the film.”
Referring to the effects of “The Last Tape of Krapp”, Pollard commented: “When you’re trying to make a portrait of someone, you’re not only trying to access the current version, but you have access to the entire recording, meaning you can draw them at other times. She’s just looking at herself and seeing her watching it.
“On a fairly simple level, Forsyth adds that “Krapp’s Last Tape” is not a biography of the character Krapp, but a portrait of the character Krapp. And at the heart of what we drive is finding ways to not create a biographical documentary. The background to the film, but it’s the idea that a film can tell a story about life…it doesn’t have to be a story. ”
“Broken English” is produced by Beth Earl from a photograph of the rustic Canyon. The script is by Forsyth, Pollard and Ian Martin. Filming was done by Daniel Landin, production design by Allison Dominiz, editor by Luke Clayton Thompson and costume design by Jerry Stafford.
Production of rustic canyons and phantom mirrors related to Magna, Globe Original, Q&A Entertainment, and cold iron photography. Global Constellation handles sales around the world.
