This portrait of Marianne Faithfull is a remarkable thing. Created by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, those who saw their Nick Cave biopic, 20,000 Days on Earth will know that the pair do not abide by the usual documentary conventions, and here it applies again.
The framing device is a fictional one, in which Tilda Swinton and George MacKay play investigators for The Ministry of Not Forgetting, a kind of Orwellian department in charge of protecting cultural memories from being lost. While the conceit is occasionally grating, it’s point is obvious when it comes to Marianne Faithfull: not so much that she will be forgotten, but that she will only be remembered in a certain way. You know, as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend in the 60s, the one found naked in a rug by police during a drugs bust (with the Mars Bar urban myth as an addendum), the one who became a junkie, before she drifted away.
When really, as this film convincingly shows, she was not simply a remarkable recording artist with an incredible body of work, but a cultural force. A pioneering voice in the Sixties era who was often drowned out by her association with The Rolling Stones - left off the credits of As Tears Go By, which she co-wrote with Jagger - and simply because of her astonishing looks, was regarded as a mere sex symbol, not to be taken seriously.
While displaying this is the mission of the film, really the heart of it are the interviews of Marianne herself. She died in January 2025 before filming could be completed but her interviews with McKay here are revelatory. With an oxygen cannula in place, she indulges McKay’s in-character questions with direct and heartfelt considerations of her life (which is where the Ministry schtick risks insincerity; only McKay’s brilliance and obvious protective enthusiasm keeps it on the right side), without giving easy answers. She rebuffs suggestions that she was unfairly kept down by Jagger with a response that is was simply the way it was at the time. And you can’t argue with that from a later milieu.
As importantly, she expands on her career beyond the Sixties, beyond her addiction, into her solo music career which climaxed with the 1979 album Broken English. In the film, the likes of Beth Orton and Suki Waterhouse deliver versions of her songs in the studio, which is topped off in a segment where Marianne joins Nick Cave and Warren Ellis as they record a cover. The warmth between them is a beautiful thing, Marianne’s pleasure at working with the two charmers more than matched by their thrill at being in the presence of a legend.
Forsyth and Pollard’s film aims to preserve the true achievements of Marianne, and in truth the Ministry of Not Forgetting scenes pale beside hearing her famous voice and her music being played.
The premiere of the film at the Barbican featured Orton (doing Sister Morphine), Jarvis Cocker, Anna Calvi (playing Falling Back, from Marianne’s collaboration album, Give My Love To London), Ed Harcourt, Nadine Shah and Rufus Wainwright in a quite brilliant performance of a suite of Marianne’s songs, which are bruised, raw and compellingly beautiful pieces of music. Watching it, you had the sense that Marianne’s reputation will only grow and grow in the years ahead, with this film as one of many windows into her wonderfully honest world.
