Coming Soon[er or Later]: The Marianne Faithfull Story

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Marianne Faithfull has reportedly signed off on plans to make a film about her life, using her 1994 autobiography Faithfull as the basis for a screenplay. "It won't happen right away," Faithfull says, "but we have found a director who I trust who wants to make a film of the book." Faithfull herself claims to have no interest in participating in the process beyond hoping the check clears. "I'm not getting involved. I'll read the script, when it's ready, which isn't for a long time, and then I'll leave it to the director and the actress he chooses. I don't want to have much to do with it. I want to read the script and like the script and then I'm going to let go of it and let them do what they want. That's the way to do it." Faithfull, who has acted in several films herself--she starred in the 1968 head trip Girl on a Motorcycle and more recently appeared in Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy (2001) and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006), and was also typecast as God in a few episodes of the TV series Absolutely Fabulous--has expressed confidence that her life would make a good movie because it's "a great story." She is not wrong, and it's also easy to see why she's prefer to leave it to somebody else to live it again.

In the 1960s, Faithfull's glistening, youthful beauty and her intimidating connections--which included not just her scandal-sheet ties to the Rolling Stones but a family that included a mother who had danced for the Max Reinhardt Company and a great-great-uncle, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who was credited with having lent his name to the term "masochism"--made her the face of Swinging London, healthy and happy and sexy on the surface but with the tantalizing suggestion of something unspeakable going on behind the palace gates. Faithfull had her own career as a pop musician, scoring hits that included the Jagger-Richards composition "As Tears Go By", and writing "Sister Morphine" for the Stones in return. In 1966, she began a very public affair with Mick Jagger, and would eventually serve as the cherry on top of an equally public drug bust at Keith Richards's place, where the cops burst in to find her draping her nude body in a fur rug. But the tabloid behavior that only enhanced the Stones' career-making images as their Satanic majesties was an anchor tied to her neck. "To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising," Faithfull said years later. "A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother." Faithfull did in fact lose custody of her son, Nicholas--born in 1965, with her then-husband John Dunbar--in 1970, the same year she broke up with Jagger. By then, she was sinking deeper into drugs and well on her way to ending up as the subject of a where-are-they-now piece.

Faithfull spent most of the 1970s, addicted to heroin and cocaine, suffering from anorexia nervosa, and undergoing extended periods of homelessness. She came back, totally unexpectedly and with a vengeance, in 1979, when she released the album Broken English, a scream of rage that mixed covers of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" and Shel Silverstein's "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" with new classics such as the title song and the seething ""Why D'Ya Do It", the song that Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know" wants to be when it grows up. She continued to reinvent herself on records and in live performance as a chilly but not unfriendly diva for the postpunk agem, the Marlene Dietrich of St. Ann's Warehouse. Now 62, Faithfull told an interviewer a couple of years ago that she'd just realized that she "had no safety net at all" and needed to start thinking about putting something away for her old age, so let's all hope she manages to make a nickel or two off this movie thing. In the meantime, her new album, Easy Come, Easy Go, which includes support from Marc Ribot, Rufus Wainwright, Chan Marshall, Nick Cave, Teddy Thompson, and whatsisname, Keith Richards, arrives in stores today.

Screengrab Review: The Duchess of Langeais

Peter Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It's rather unfortunate that Jacques Rivette's latest film is being released here with a title that conveys generic period stodginess à la Masterpiece Theatre, since the original French title — Ne touchez pas la hache, or "Don't Touch the Axe" — better conveys the razor-sharp edges of this superlative, expertly calibrated battle of wills. Faithfully adapted from Honoré de Balzac's novella, it opens in and around a Spanish convent, where gimpy, sullen war veteran Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gérard) seeks an audience with a Barefoot Carmelite nun who calls herself Sister Theresa (Jeanne Balibar). Their brief, impassioned interview, conducted under the suspicious eye of the Mother Superior, abruptly concludes when an agonized Sister Theresa cries out, "Mother, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" At which point the film jumps back five years in order to recount the torturous quasi-courtship of the nun — now revealed as the titular Duchess — and the general, an affair characterized by elaborate, courtly head games that amount to a 19th-century equivalent of The Rules.

Nobody understood the maddening allure of the almost attainable better than Balzac, and Rivette matches the author's emotional precision with one subtly stunning composition after another, buttressed by a handful of short yet heartbreaking lateral pans that move us from master to close-up without the violence of a cut. (It's the cut afterward that draws blood.) He also makes much more effective and perverse use of textual intertitles than did Patrice Chéreau in Gabrielle, a film that now looks even more overwrought and mannered by comparison. Balibar's wily, impassioned performance was a given — her best work to date was as the star of Rivette's 2001 effort La Savoir — but I hadn't expected such muted volcanic ardor from Depardieu fils, who practically broods a hole in the floor of every room he enters. And while I'm weary of the structural device in which we open with the penultimate scene and then flash back to see the events that led to this crisis/impasse, here the device is absolutely crucial, tainting every bit of gamesmanship that follows/precedes it. Indeed, I desperately hoped that the film would end without returning to the convent, and was somewhat disappointed when there turned out to be an epilogue of sorts. But even that perfunctory flourish slices clean. — Mike D'Angelo

The Screengrab : patrice chereau

Coming Soon[er or Later]: The Marianne Faithfull Story

Screengrab Review: The Duchess of Langeais