San Francisco Frontiers - New documentary casts Marianne Faithfull in new light

"Broken English" is an out-of-competition entry in the prestigious festival from British directing duo Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth, which casts the singer-songwriter's legacy and reputation in a new light.

After being discovered in 1964, Faithfull shot to fame with the hit "As Tears Go By", written by her former boyfriend, Mick Jagger, and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.

"Broken English" includes archival footage and conversations with Faithfull -- who died at age 78 during production -- but the film's unique format means it mixes fiction and multiple genres.

It features a fictional Ministry of Not Forgetting -- whose director is played by Tilda Swinton -- charged with rectifying the historical memory of Faithfull, whose outspokenness and no-holds-barred lifestyle fuelled a backlash from the British press.

Her relationship with Jagger ended up overshadowing her own career, while sudden fame and fortune brought on drug addiction and eventually homelessness.

Her 1979 album "Broken English" breathed new life into her career, and she worked relentlessly, collaborating with a stream of younger artists keen to work with her.

- 'Rightfully wary' -

In seeking to set the story straight on her life, the real-life Faithfull is presented with photographs or other materials by a fictional archivist (George MacKay), even as contemporary musicians interpret Faithfull's work or reflect on her influence.

Filmmaker Forsyth said he saw the film as a portrait of the artist, rather than a documentary.

"If you think of all of the great portraits throughout history, the paintings, the photography, that has captured the essence of someone, they all do it in some sort of way collaborating with their subject," Forsyth told a press conference Saturday.

As a format, documentary "carries with it a journalistic kind of baggage" that did not fit the filmmakers' purposes, Pollard said.

She conceded that Faithfull was initially "rightfully wary" of the idea of the fictional institution scouring her past.

"But I think she could recognise very quickly in the days that we were filming with her how it allowed a freedom to be able to open up and explore to look back and reconsider," Pollard said.

She called for "urgent recalibration of some brilliant artists' legacies that are just simply going to be forgotten or misrepresented."

In recent years, the British pop-rock balladeer, who released more than 20 albums during her career, battled illness, including breast cancer and a severe bout of Covid.

In the film, Faithfull is in a wheelchair and wearing a nasal cannula for oxygen.

The film on her is one of several documentaries by international directors in the Venice festival running through September 6 on the Lido, including Gianfranco Rosi's ode to Naples, "Sotto le Nuvole" (Under the Clouds) and "Ghost Elephants" from Werner Herzog.

- Hidden worlds -

"Sotto le Nuvole" is a black-and-white look at Naples and the volcanoes hovering around it, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, where near-daily earthquakes "are a source of destabilisation, fear and a sense of precariousness," Rosi told journalists.

Cutting back and forth with images of steam rising from the volcanoes, the film goes underground, under the yet-unexcavated depths of Herculaneum or the bowels of Naples' archaeology museum, where dusty statues and busts are silent witness to past eras.

A sense of unease hovers throughout the film, which follows tomb raiders' tunnels and includes calls from anxious citizens to the fire department after earthquakes.

The film, which took three years to edit, is the only documentary in the main competition, where 21 works are vying for the top Golden Lion prize.

"Ghost Elephants" by Herzog, who received a lifetime achievement award during the festival's opening ceremony, follows the search for an elusive -- and possibly nonexistant -- new species of elephant in the high-altitude forests of Angola.

Another documentary taking the viewer to hidden worlds is Massimiliano Camaiti's "Agnus Dei", shot inside a Rome cloister where each spring the nuns raise a pair of lambs for their wool, which they weave into a vestment for the pope.

The documentary was filmed during the hospitalisation and death of Pope Francis, and the election of new Pope Leo.

S.Jackson--SFF