An average movie

Even though some of my favorites bands are from the 60’s and 70’s, I have to admit that I was never really particularly interested in Marianne Faithfull. On the other hand, I just didn’t know much about her, except for her rather notorious reputation, so I hoped this movie would be the opportunity to learn more about her. Well, even though everyone in my film club thought the whole thing was quite fascinating, to be honest, I really had a hard time to care about this movie and Faithfull in general. The tricky thing with a documentary is that, if you go for something straightforward, you have the feeling that you just simply go through the highlights of someone’s life which is usually not really thrilling. In this case, they at least tried to go for something more original which was really commendable. Unfortunately, in my opinion, in this case, this artsy-fartsy approach turned out to be a distraction. Seriously, if you have only 100 mins of running time, who cares about Tilda Swinton and other actors pretending to be some futuristic archivists? At least, it was a really nice surprise that Marianne Faithfull was actually personally involved as I assumed that she passed away before this movie was made. It also featured her very last performance just a few months before she was really gone. However, if you put away the surreal approach, at the end of the day, they were still praising her like any other standard documentary when I wish they went deeper into this woman. Beyond being a pretty face when she started out as teenager, beyond being Mick Jagger’s ex like 100s of other women, beyond being a major junkie for about a decade, who was she really? Well, the approach chosen here was to show her mostly as a victim which was a mistake in my opinion. Indeed, she was a victim of how she was perceived as a beautiful pure angel when she started as a teenager, then she was a victim when she was perceived as a promiscuous drug addict, in both cases, usually by male chauvinistic reporters but, instead of constantly victimizing here, they could have displayed her more as a gifted artist but, as far as I was concerned, I only got a glimpse of that after all. Anyway, to conclude, even if I didn’t care much about the damned thing, I still think it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Marianne Faithfull.