Review of Amy (2015) by Joe H — 07 Jul 2015

In July 2011, rhythm and blues singer Amy Winehouse passed away at the premature age of 27 to an outcry by her fanbase. Winehouse had a troubled relationship with a media who seemed to stalk her for the next opportunity she would pass out in a club or walk the streets with a bottle. Events seemed to be in motion following her death: in that same month the Leveson Inquiry began, leading to multiple jobs lost and the closure of the News of the World for its fundamentally amoral methods of journalism, but also a brilliant documentary had been released chronicling the life of another Icarus figure who died before their time, the Brazilian Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna. Its director was the 38 year old Asif Kapadia. After 2 years of research, filming and editing down over 500 hours of archive footage, finally the paths of Kapadia and Winehouse have crossed into a superb documentary which, like Senna, detracts the investigative side from the documentary genre and replaces it with a dark, fairytale narrative.

There is something oddly fitting about the film being released less than a year after Into the Woods. Kapadia and his editor Chris King, who have reunited after their BAFTA award-winning work on Senna, use the footage available to them to weave a twisted Grimm's tale of the danger of getting one's wish. Winehouse is shown from the age of 16 to display her soulful voice from another time, more Nina Simone than Britney Spears, and yet the focus of the film is on her warm but spiky personality. Kapadia rarely leaves Winehouse out of the frame and for the majority of the runtime allows her to speak for herself. When her agent states that it was her frank nature that made him fall a little in love with her, Kapadia brings in some footage to prove his point. Even if you went in to watch Amy completely unaware of the singer, you won't be able to help giving her a small place in your heart. As her profile rises and the faceless paparazzi grow into hordes of shutter clicks and blinding strobe lights, there is no reasoning that can make anyone feel anything but sympathy for Winehouse, especially when the filmmakers give her more of a chance to speak than the photographers.

By her nature as a songwriter as well as a singer, Winehouse's music features a prominent role in the documentary to bookmark chapters in her life, and the end result becomes something more akin to a musical. In interviews King has said that Kapadia's Indian descent had given him a heritage in Bollywood films, which is what the original concept of the first cut would have looked like. The end result is less of a superficial feature, with a greater focus on Winehouse's lyrics, her voice simply a mouthpiece for her innermost thoughts. These sections give the piece a personal insight which is unmatched in the documentary genre or books on Winehouse's music. The combination of narrative and commentary reveals something about the songs, rather than placing them as incidental music to feel like an advertisement to keep the record companies happy.

With such a focus on Winehouse herself however comes at a cost of reducing her surrounding friends and family to an extent. Despite the wishes of King for the film to show a straight and unbiased portrayal of the narrative, the events displayed in Amy are utterly damning towards boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil, musician Pete Doherty (who appears like a demonic agent casually to tempt Winehouse towards heroin), and father Mitch Winehouse. At the time of writing this review, Mitch Winehouse has begun pre-production on a documentary to display "the real story" after his portrayal in Kapadia's film: the sections of his interventions into his daughter's life involve keeping her on tour and away from rehab, as well as bringing a Channel4 documentary crew supposedly following his side of the story to Amy's retreat away from the British press. As for Winehouse's allies, they are reduced to generic, non-famous friend status. Despite the perspectives of Winehouse's closest friends being displayed throughout the film, the audience at the Glastonbury Festival seemed more in discussion about Russell Brand's blink-and-you'll-(hopefully)-miss-him appearance in Winehouse's story. This could be a statement on celebrity culture, but it seemed that Amy seemed to almost buy into the glamour magazine attitude which it condemns.

These are minor quibbles though, and it would have been hard to voice them after numerous bouts of crying (I cried three times, and my eyes were the driest in the house!). Nobody can deny that what Kapadia and his editors have crafted is a superb documentary which, like Senna before it, breaks down the documentary into a different form of storytelling, part biopic part Bollywood. Winehouse's end feels as sudden in the film as it did in the events of her life, and Kapadia captures the flow of real time as if he were controlling sand through an hourglass. Amy is a feature for those interested in hearing a story, not just for die-hard fans. Kapadia has created the most haunting musical to date; let's hope that his genre experimentation has only just begun.