Broken English: The Ministry of Not Forgetting

Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth made this film as Marianne Faithfull was dying. She died in January 2025, during production. This fact transforms what could have been biography into something else entirely—a memorial.

Straightforward chronology couldn’t contain Faithfull. She moved across too many contradictions. So the directors built a framing device: the “Ministry of Not Forgetting.” Tilda Swinton appears as the Overseer. George MacKay as a researcher excavating and organizing her archive. This frame transforms what could have been linear into something stranger—a meditation on how we construct meaning from a life, how we turn existence into memory.

Daniel Landin’s cinematography oscillates between documentary and symbolic abstraction. Never settles on single register. The instability mirrors the film’s preoccupation with unstable identity, shifting allegiances, lives that resist categorization.

The film refuses simplicity. Faithfull isn’t victim or hero or martyr or villain. Instead the film maintains affectionate complexity. It acknowledges her genuine contributions and her participation in dynamics that diminished her agency. She lived within patriarchal structures designed to reduce her to ornament—Jagger’s muse, a gossip item, an object of pity. But she resisted. Her later work achieved wisdom the younger woman couldn’t have accessed. The film honors both versions without suggesting this is contradiction.

Ninety-nine minutes. Luke Clayton Thompson edits with apparent ease. Scenes breathe. Interviews, archival footage, and Swinton’s surreal presence coexist without hierarchy. Rob Ellis’ score operates as emotional undercurrent—present, shaping register, never overwhelming.

The final performance is what matters most. Faithfull sings with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Her voice is aged and weathered. No less commanding. This is her final recorded performance. The knowledge of that transforms it into requiem, though the film refuses sentimentality. She sings with the authority of decades of use and survival. The performance clarifies the film’s argument: an artist’s worth isn’t measured in youth. Time and suffering deepen rather than diminish authenticity.

The “Ministry of Not Forgetting” could seem whimsical. Instead it’s the film’s best decision. Remembrance is active, ritualistic. Not just recall but construction, organization, assertion that a life matters against erasure. Swinton as Overseer acknowledges cinema’s surreality—it allows the dead to speak. MacKay’s researcher navigates the archive, assembling meaning from fragments. We witness the process of creating memory even as we participate in it.

By refusing to make Faithfull safe, insisting on messy authenticity, Pollard and Forsyth created genuine memorial work. Not biography. A space where remembrance becomes possible.