Marianne Faithful died in late January 2025. That winter was one too many for her frailty to survive. In an age of artists stretching their cretivity well into the years past their peak with the help of younger sympathetic musicians, she was seemingly still active until the notice of her death made the music press, long adapted to an active cotery of senior citizens taking aim at infinity with their latest offering, announced her death and the media poured out their usual mixd bag of tributes.
So with the announcement of this film, fourteen moths after her death, and in a year in which the biggest news about her was the sale of the contents of the flats she had lived lived in, in tasteful oppulence. The disbursal of her personal effects underlined the finality of her life.
The film starts with a framing device that becomes the Plan B for the way to explain Marainne Faithful's life when she was too ill to be explain it herself. She died aged 78 but was still volluable in her opinion of what could be seen as 'a troubled life' at the age 75. When some of this was evidently filmed. When she is interviewed she speaks very clearly and without any self pitly about a past the given her daliances with recreational drugs, The Rolling Stones, The Daily Express, and poor mental health she could be excused for doing.
The framing device is the called 'The Ministry Of Not Forgetting' and with the performance of Tilda Swinton, the ministry was true to it's word. It does not let the viewer forget. Nor does it fully help the viewer remember. Particularly with the films of her career, from 'Girl on a Motorcycle' from 1968 through to 'Irina Palm' (2007), a film I have seen and can thoroughly reccomend. But here the ministry had neither the rights, nor the screen time for sharing with us the details of her filmography in any enough depth. Though the footage of Marianne measuring up for her costume and moving about on set as Marie Annetionette in 2006 was welcome. Theatre is an even more ephemeral thing to catch on fim, so her live theatre experiences were recalled with a few photographs, not even a full list of the stage productions she was in.
But the first point to remember is the myth that Andrew Loog Oldham created, not knowing who Marriane Faithful was or what her parents had done to prepare her for a creative life life as an adult. She grew up in an arts laboratory where writing acting and all aspects of the stageing of plays were open to her. For Oldham to meet her at a party and cast her as a teenage version of The Singing Nun... Well, the less said about how Oldham's delusions were built on Faithful's formal and informal education that he did not know before meeting her, the better. Her connecting with The Rolling Stones was inevitable after a start like that. I liked how Faithful was dismissive abouth the broadsheet notoriety that came to her when the paper, The Daily Express, was on the table with the masthead visible to the camera and she was only slightly rude when disimissing what the The Daily Express wrote as completely fabricatred. The chapter in her life that came after that, between Brian Jones, Jagger and Richards, and Anita Pallenberrg was well beyond what The Daily Express could have printed. That Faithful wrote and recorded 'Sister Morphine' as a way of establishing a more adult set of song writing boundaries, when Decca stopped the song being released because it was un-ladylike, and Jagger took the credit for the song and got it recorded for the first post-Decca album the The Rolling Stones released, by which time Faithful had been commited to an Australian mental hospital whilst the Rolling Stones were on tour there.... I forget now Faithful's actual comments about that era of her life. A lot of that era was relayed in collage form, reduced to a series of photographs and newspaper headlines.
Her story picks up proper with the 1978 video for 'The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan' where how well The Rolling Stones were doing was the casual comparison that was made. Here the male viewer [at least this gay male viewer] readjusts to the presentation quirks of that era. The era of women's beauty seeming to be forced and yet how what women wanted to present themselves as. The relative crudity of the analogue filming as compared with modern high definition digital added to how forced the images seemed to be. But from here on, Marriane Faithful was back, and back on her own terms assisted by the advent of the DIY ethic of punk. The album 'Broken English' gave the public the adult Faithful fifteen years after 'As Tears Go By' had given the public the teenage Marriane Faithful who had to be more grown up on the entertainment industry she was part of than she could admit she was, and stuggled whilst showing she was a skilled stage actress. Faithful spoke about the double meaning of the album title where at one level language was what was broken, and she, as an English woman was recovering from being broken, including alcohol and substance misuse which had added a depth to her voice. One point I have not mentioned so far is the brightness of her smile when she is on camera, the way her presence as a live human being pulls the cinema goer in to focus on her.
From here on is where the vewer sees less of Maranne on screen and more footage of her is pulled in to tell her story, including a brief section of film of women of the 2020s discussing the battles that Faithful fought for womankind from the 1980s onward, as if the complexity of what opposed her career path coupled with he fragile physical health made it too exhausting for her to be her own witness, therefore better for other to relay the changes. The Ministry Of Not Forgetting staged various interventions with footage of meetings with former life partners and musical collaborators. The saddest intervention was of the footage and photographs of her later era colaborator Hal Wilner (1956 - 2020) the clue to the cause of his death being the year in which he died, of complications from Covid. Just as Marriane Faithful herself could have died but after a period where it was touch and go, she survived.
The loss of such a close friend whilst recovering was a double blow to her will to continue as a recording and performing artist. But cameos from songwriters Jarvis Cocker, Ed Harcourt and the team of Warren Ellis, violin, and Nick Cave, piano. The more the Ministry Of Not Forgetting intervenes the theatrical a device it became where it did not take much guesswork to say to myself that Faithful was too ill to be made up for the screen for the next close up of her smiling, the performance of her songs by younger female artists was delightful and absorbing and I was happy with them whilst wishing that Faithful herself had been fit enough to be filmed singing the songs, live. I half expected Faithful to do what writer Edna O'brien did in the documentary on her life, 'Blue Road', filmed when she was 94, where mid interview the author have a medical emergency on screeen where the film sequence ended with O'brien taken away from the interview, set up in her library, by anbulance men and stretcher bearers. But no, that was not to be. The hour and forty mins or so had gone by so fast and had skimmed over so much in such an immersive way that viewers could see that well, they could not get away from the ending, which had to had to put Marrane Faithful central to the film.
Whilst it was clear her health was fading. Then as the last few minutes of the film approached there was the footage in the studio of her rasping voice, clearly Covid ravaged but unmistakeably hers, singing the song 'Misunderstanding' from her 2021 album 'Negative Capability' empthetically accompanied by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave. The lyric of the song being a plea for empathy. Cue the credits, and time enough to dry our eyes without feeling in any way emotionally manipulated.
This was life. Empathy is what extends a life, makes accounting for itt possible, and makes how the life was lived more widely appreciated.
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