Death of Marianne Faithfull: Back on five significant roles in her career
The Rock Sixties icon, Muse of Rolling Stones left us at the age of 78. She leaves a great career as an actress. Selection.
Made in USA (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
A year before fucating with the Rolling Stones for his One + OneJLG films their Muse Marianne Faithfull for a Cappella sequence where she interprets her inaugural tube composed by Jagger and Richards, As tears go by. In this deliberately pop film where Godard pays his debt to a dream America, the signs are everywhere. Marianne Faithfull is MF there and recalls that the icon participated in the British Invasion in the USA at the very moment when the Pope of the new wave immortalized him with her camera. Faithfull’s real cinematographic beginnings will take place the same year under the leadership of Michael Winner in What will happen after? Where she faces Orson Welles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5f1cqajivm
Motorcycle (Jack Cardiff, 1968)
Directed by the legendary chief of the most beautiful films by Powell and Pressburger (Red slippers,, Black narcissusexcuse a little), Motorcycle is an erotic-motorized pre-Easy Rideradored by the fetishists of the Harley-Davidson and the London swinging. And leather, obviously, since we see Marianne Faithfull slip there, entirely naked, in a fantasy combination, before rushing to join her lover played by Alain Delon on two wheels (which the singer, by the way, will treat of “asshole” in a song, 34 years later). Between pop curiosity, soft eroticism and bikesploitationthe film was one of the very first to be ranked X in the United States, before being expared from its hottest and renamed scenes Naked Under Leather (Naked under his leather), in order to surf the sulphurous aura of his star, forged in the cuffs of the tabloids relating his bacchanal with the Rolling Stones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rschhksuxo
Privacy (Patrice Chéreau, 2001)
For those who did not follow Marianne Faithfull, her presence in this London exile of Patrice Chéreau could have gone unnoticed. Not that its certainly discreet role is not strong but Faithfull is quite unrecognizable. She embodies a “lady” who follows the drama courses of Claire the sulphurous heroine of this sexual and passionate drama. It is quite beautiful to see how the singer-actress had fun here playing the voluntary student, wishing to transfigure her life through the game. With the role Betty, Marianne F. entered the new millennium.
Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)
Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst repeat Versailles in Macaron pink, New Order thoroughly in their iPods. They are the pop princesses of the new millennium. Who to embody their grandmother, the queen of icons knowing how to combine grace and debauchery, frivolity and subversion? Marianne Faithfull of course, here cast by the author of Virgin Suicides In empress Marie-Thérèse of Austria, mother of the future Queen Guillotiné. A role which assists a little more the status of Faithfull idol with a new generation which looked at the sixties as a mythological golden age, and its stars as members of a bohemian aristocracy. Lady Marianne, definitely.
Irina Palm (Sam Garbarski, 2007)
Strange comeback for Marianne Faithfull in a soho with a fading faded or even depraved. Faithfull is here a sensitive granny who to cover the costs of hospitalization of her seriously ill grant, agrees to masturbate anonymously customers of a sordid move from the West End London. The granny changes by Blaze and becomes Irina Palm letting an age more in accordance with her function. Faithfull is magnificent there and diverts the film from the traps of an announced sentimentality. This is perhaps the last striking role in the rock icon if we except its vocal presence in the Dune de Denis Villeneuve in 2021.
