‘At First, She Couldn’t Get Off The Oxygen Long Enough’: The Film That Gives Marianne Faithfull One Last Thrilling Performance | film

WWhen Marianne Faithfull died in early 2025, at the age of 78, she left the world with one last musical performance. It comes at the end of a new film, Broken English, which celebrates her six-decade career. It’s a very moving scene, and will almost certainly leave you in tears. You don’t need to be a complete fan, up to that point, to enjoy Faithfull’s candid looks at her amazing life – but this husky-voiced final number, accompanied by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, should grab it.

How do you make a movie about Faithfull without bringing up all the annoying 60s rock legends? Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard seem to have nailed it. The filmmakers initially had just three days with Faithfull, on set at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire. She lived in a nursing home and needed oxygen intermittently, which meant the couple had to act quickly. “She was very ill when we first met her,” Pollard says.

Their urgency to correct the record of an often misrepresented artist is reflected in their film’s fictional setting: a glorified analog organization—all buzzing tapes and slamming buttons—called the Ministry of Not Forgetting. Tilda Swinton plays its leader, overseeing a research team intent on recording all of Faithfull’s output, from playing Ophelia in Tony Richardson’s Hamlet, to teaching lyric writing at Jack Kerouac’s School of Disembodied Poetics, and her song Sister Morphine being pulled from the shelves.

During filming, Pollard noticed a “great truth” about Faithfull: she had “an intense desire to completely cut off the atmosphere of a room and reset everything. To make people laugh or get on their nerves — it’s like a weapon.” Minutes into the movie, we heard Faithfull deploy the C-word. “He silenced the room,” Pollard recalls.

This happens during a series of tense now-or-never conversations with a researcher played by George MacKay. Faithfull is on display with artifacts from her career. In one painfully old interview, Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham asked regarding Faithfull: “Is it possible that you could literally go to a party and pick up someone who has no obvious talent and make her a star?” “Yes,” says Logue Oldham. Faithfull, in the film, is different, and speaks with an exaggerated accent. “Of course you can’t go to a party and pick someone who has no talent and make them a star. Everyone knows that. It was probably helpful for me – because I might have thought: ‘I’ll show you my cunt.'”

Show them she did. As Swinton’s character recounts it: “More than 30 albums, a slew of adoring collaborators, and a Grammy nomination for a Grammy.” [album] Broken English The Order of Arts and Letters, awarded by the French government, continues. She has survived addiction, overdoses, cancer and much more… However, to the whole world, she is still just Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend. Well, fuck that.”

The poignant emotions Faithfull feels watching her 19-year-old self in Don’t Look Back — the 1967 documentary about Bob Dylan on tour — are brutal. “It lit up,” Pollard says. Faithfull remembers Dylan approaching her. Bent over a typewriter among his entourage in a London hotel room, Dylan told her he was writing a poem about her. “If I had a dollar for every nice man who said to me, ‘This song, this poem, about you, baby, I’d be rich,'” she says beamingly, before looking on sadly as her little girl harmonizes with Joan Baez on “As Tears Go By,” Faithfull’s song that hit No. 9 in the UK charts. “Joan Baez is playing my song,” she says with teenage awe, as if it had just happened.

What surprised Pollard most about Faithfull? “Although it is still relatively self-destructive, it has not been affected by the industry,” says the director. However, Faithfull is saddened when a video of her at 60 comes out in which she declares that she loves being at this age, feeling healthy and philosophical about things. She says she didn’t know what was coming. “Now I’m less philosophical. I hate what happened to me. Covid did it.”

On a personal level, Pollard says, Faithfull can be intimidating. “Really creepy. If you look at other movies of hers, you can see that she had sex with someone so hard that they decided to let that leak into the movie.” But this went against the two rules the duo had adopted in Broken English: “We don’t talk about the kids, because if it were a male artist, we wouldn’t talk about their role as a father. The other one is: They can be really annoying and incredibly scary but we won’t show that. Because, again, with a lot of male performers, there are teams of people who are swept up in the afterlife of intimidating and neglectful behavior.”

Forsyth brings up a 1967 drug raid at Redlands, the home of Keith Richards. “Bad Behavior,” quote, unquote, by Mick and Keith makes them more interesting, more compelling, more bizarre, more desirable. [When a male artist] He has a tantrum at the end of the recording session, because he is a genius, overwhelmed with emotions. If a woman does that, it’s because she’s a bit of a slut.

In the film, we see Faithfull as professional, game, accepting, apologetic about her need for oxygen, and sad. When she was shown a recording of American poets Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg saying she had a good heart, she seemed to recoil.

Forsyth and Pollard were not lifelong fans of Faithfull when the project was first talked about. “We grew up just knowing that outrageous lie about Marianne,” Pollard says. Legend has it that in the Redlands raid, police found Faithfull wearing nothing but a fur rug (true, for practical reasons) and performing a sex act using a Mars tape (false). “We weren’t fans of Marianne until later, when a lot of the musicians we liked were working with her: PJ Harvey, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, Metallica, Nick Cave, and Warren Ellis.”

The filmmakers have long been inspired by Krapp’s The Last Tape, Samuel Beckett’s play about an old man who listens to recordings of himself when he was younger. “For most of the play, you’re listening to the younger Krapp and seeing the face of the older Krapp. It’s a beautiful study of aging, human behavior and memory,” Pollard says.

Ahead of the production of Broken English, they spoke to Faithfull about the play and “the idea of ​​watching her meet her younger version. When we were coming out of the archives, we worked hard to find clips of her that weren’t just saying the usual things. Covid really messed with her memory. I think it was incredibly empowering for her to meet this army of younger Marianne who all demonstrated to her this consistency of character, this strength of mind.”

As they researched, they began to appreciate the many traumas Faithfull faced, sometimes all at once. “These cluster dates occurred around 1969: the sister’s morphine withdrawal, her miscarriage and the death of her son.” [Rolling Stones guitarist] Brian Jones. It all happened in such a short period of time. We wrote it on the whiteboard and looked at it and said, “This is incredible.” No wonder they fly to Australia. But it was never framed that way.

As the shooting continued, “it actually got stronger,” Pollard says. “She had found a purpose again. The film seemed, strangely, like a scaffolding. She started climbing this thing and wanted to write new songs, or perform something.” Since it seemed unlikely that she would be able to sing for the film, other artists were called in, from Beth Orton to Courtney Love, who sings in Times Square in 1983. Pollard describes Love as “this wonderful, joyful cipher, singing that song about addiction and ruling the entire recording studio.”

Initially, it was hoped that Faithfull would perform at the end of the three days of initial filming, but her doctor advised her against it. “Her breathing wasn’t forceful enough,” Forsyth says. “She wouldn’t have been able to get off the oxygen long enough.” But a year later, after apprenticing with her friend David Curtis, the jeweler who made Richards’ famous skull ring, Faithfull wanted to give it a try. So they went into the studio with Cave and Ellis.

“It was a very special moment, seeing her in her natural environment with the musicians she loved, all working together,” Forsyth says. “It felt special to be able to give that to her at the end of her life.” Were they all crying? “There were some tears,” Pollard says. “I mean, Warren Ellis almost cries every time Marianne sings. Her voice in the room is phenomenal. You can hear every part of her being.”