An extraordinary experiment
Broken English was the opening film of the magnificent In-Edit festival that is just ending today. The immense luck is that you can recover the documentary on Filmin. It is a true treasure, for its approach and for the originality and sensitivity of its directors, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. The protagonist is Marianne Faithfull, but even if you do not know anything about the artist, it is very much worth it. It has nothing to do with any audiovisual biography you have seen before, because it is not just about reviewing someone's life, but also about understanding how memory about someone is built. And the way to do it is a stroke of genius.
The documentary takes its title from one of Faithfull's greatest musical hits. The story is built upon a fiction: the Ministry for Not Forgetting, directed by Tilda Swinton, attempts to reimagine what it means to preserve cultural legacy. And to experience it, she chooses Marianne Faithfull, who asserts that she is the perfect case to analyze it. Swinton argues: "A career of more than six decades, thirty albums with a huge list of collaborators, from McCartney to Metallica, passing through the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. A Grammy nomination for Broken English, the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France. She has survived addictions, overdoses, cancer, and, recently, a coma caused by covid. And yet, for the general public, she remains only Mick Jagger's ex-girlfriend. Well, screw that!"
Marianne Faithfull, at 75 years old and connected to an oxygen tank, faces an unusual experiment. We see an entire team of ministry technicians working to recover the whole media universe that exists around Faithfull. Actor George MacKay talks with the artist and offers her some of this material for her to evaluate and review. Swinton, from a high office that controls everything, manages the process. In parallel, a sound and recording department revisits her songs with other artists, such as Beth Orton, Courtney Love, and Nick Cave.
The documentary exercise is a wonder, because it allows the protagonist to distinguish between who she is and who they wanted her to be. The Ministry for Not Forgetting works to analyze how the media constructed a narrative, and now its job is to reinterpret, correct, or provide context to a past that has not always been fair. Even major news scandals are analyzed based on highly original dialectical approaches that allow us to discover that, in reality, they were built upon very specific political and media interests. The experiment also allows for a highly revealing gender-perspective look at the way successful women are judged, especially those who have not conformed to conventional roles. “Creativity and memory are inseparable,” says Tilda Swinton in the documentary. And in this case, the result is simply masterful.
