Amy - The Girl Behind the Name

The cover story of this week's edition of music magazine NME is: 'Who killed Amy?' It would have been a perfect title for this superb documentary. I went to see it, hoping it would answer two questions. One: could Amy Winehouse's death have been prevented in any way? Two: if so, by whom? The film provides crystal clear answers to both questions. One: no, it probably couldn't have been prevented - at best it could have been postponed. Two: several members of her entourage have probably contributed to her downward spiral. Her father, who wasn't there when he should be and was there when he shouldn't. Her husband, who encouraged her drugs abuse and seems to be an utterly despicable person. And the press, who relentlessly haunted her and enjoyed every misstep in her life. But the documentary also makes one thing very clear: in the end there's only one person responsible for Amy Winehouse's death: Amy Winehouse.

Apart from providing a stunning insight in Winehouse's short life and career, 'Amy' is also a great movie from a cinematographic perspective. The unique feature is that it consists almost entirely of existing footage. It's absolutely incredible what the film makers (with the help of the Winehouse family) have unearthed. Lots of home videos, from her youth as well as from her later life, interviews, recording sessions, telephone conversations, even voice mail messages. Sometimes it almost feels uncomfortable to view images, clearly made for personal use, on a giant screen. But they are extremely revealing. There were numerous moments when I felt like saying: wow! The very first moments of the film are almost worth the ticket price. We see an amateur home video of a birthday party: 14 year old girls giggling and fooling around, until suddenly one of them starts singing 'Happy Birthday' with a voice and technique that seem to belong to Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald. We also see Winehouse commenting after her first single has sold 800 copies, we see a hilarious scene during a holiday in Spain, but we also see her waving a bag of marijuana in front of the camera, we see her arguing with her father, visiting her incarcerated husband, and in one haunting scene, lying on the floor in what seems a drunken stupor.

'Amy' tells an extremely sad story. It's told in all honesty: it shows how incredibly talented Winehouse was, and how dedicated to her music, but also how insecure and self-destructive. When one of her childhood friends tells how she felt when, in the end, Winehouse wasn't her old self anymore, she almost starts sobbing in the microphone. I have no doubt each and every one in the cinema theatre felt the same way after seeing this film.

Asif Kapadia's documentary tells a familiar tale of the life and death of Amy Winehouse - a precocious talent from North London with a unique vocal and songwriting talent destroyed by a combination of willful manipulation, drugs and drink. The same could also be said for other great jazz singers of the past, notably Billie Holiday (whose voice often seems eerily similar to Winehouse's).

With the help of childhood friends and archive interviews, Kapadia paints a picture of a Jewish girl growing up in an unstable household. Her father Mitch had an affair when Amy was still a baby, and finally left home when she was eight or nine. Her mother Janis admitted that she was really too weak to keep Amy under control: Amy grew up doing virtually what she wanted with little or no authority to restrain her.

By her teenage years it was clear that Amy had a unique talent for singing and writing songs reflecting her various angst. Signed to a contract by Island Records, she gradually rose to stardom, while keeping her feet on the ground; she was always someone most at home with writing and recording music. Video footage from the period shows her enjoying herself with her companions as they traveled to various gigs. At heart she was a girl wanting to enjoy the experience of growing up and adjusting to the world.

Things only really started going wrong once she crossed the Rubicon from well-known jazz artist into international star. Feted on television in both Britain and the United States, it seemed as if the world was her oyster. Yet it was also evident that she was too much influenced by hangers-on wanting a piece of her. Her husband Blake Fielder, a feckless junkie, introduced her to hard drugs; a succession of ineffectual managers including Monte Lipman failed to shield her from the media; and her father came back into her life as someone more interested in making money than protecting his daughter. Kapadia's film suggests that perhaps her father was most at fault for his daughter's decline; in one sequence he brings a camera-crew to St. Lucia, thereby ruining Amy's attempts to enjoy some kind of peace away from the media.

Amy's troubled life is juxtaposed with performances of her greatest songs, whose lyrics are put on screen as she sings them. It's clear that she wrote from bitter experience; the only way she could make sense of it was to write about it. We get the sense that Amy performed first and foremost for herself.

Her untimely death at the age of twenty-seven remains something of a mystery. From the evidence presented in this film, we are left uncertain as to whether she took her own life or whether she died accidentally. Given the prison-like existence she led for the last five years of her life, culminating in the now-notorious occasion when she failed to perform at a Belgrade concert, it's tempting to think that she had had enough.

Few of her close associates come out with any credit as a result of this film. It's almost as if they wanted to exploit her, and when she died, they ascribed the tragedy to fate rather than admitting responsibility for it. This is especially true of Mitch.

The ending is almost unbearably poignant. It seems such a sad waste of a unique talent. Nonetheless at least we have her musical legacy in the form of her recordings, both live and in the studio.

This is a fascinating and heartbreakingly sad and dark depiction of the life of a brilliant singer. It's a touching testament to Winehouse's career, relationships and ups and downs, and it takes a very dramatic but powerful approach to telling the story in Asif Kapadia's inventive documentary style.

Kapadia directed my favourite film of all time, Senna, which I have, after countless viewings, found to be incredibly powerfully emotional, consistently exciting and, most of all, stunningly original.

Originality is a hard thing to come by in the documentary genre, but Kapadia, in both Senna and Amy, uses this fascinating style of presenting a documentary in the form of a narrative drama to make it a more engrossing and captivating experience, something that works so well, and makes for an absolutely brilliant watch.

The story of Amy Winehouse is a bittersweet one, and this film does that reality justice. On the one hand, it does a fantastic job of showing her fun-loving and upbeat personality in the years before the health problems started, and it really gives you a lasting image of a completely different Amy Winehouse to the one that almost lived in infamy towards the end of the 2000s.

However, on the other hand, this film is quite brutal and dark to watch due to its very realistic depiction of the impact of drugs, drinking and bad relationships on her life. In the second act of the film, Kapadia does a stunning job of showing how Winehouse's life completely disintegrated due to all of these problems, and it is a truly striking thing to watch.

Despite the darkness of that part of the story, one thing that remains positive throughout is how the film celebrates Winehouse's incredible talent for jazz singing. It interlinks the events of her life with her earliest and most famous singles and turns them into strongly symbolic demonstrations of her deepest emotions and thoughts.

Overall, this is a brilliantly intriguing documentary that will move you to the core. It uses a fantastically inventive narrative style to create a powerful story that shows so clearly the bittersweet nature of the life of an amazing singer.

www.themadmovieman.com

As the public we only see the picture that is given us, but Asif Kapadia's new movie, Amy, shows us the behind-the-scenes of extremely talented star Amy Winehouse. We catch glimpses of young teen Amy, smiling to the camera. We watch Amy enjoy making her music. We replay her breakthrough. And we see the horrific reality of the consequences of her fame, and the influence of the press. This masterpiece is an eye-opener and shows the truth behind the glamour of the red carpet.

Even though most people know the story of Amy, it has never been retold in this setting. Archive footage which makes the movie real, raw and honest. Commentary of people who have participated in Amy's life, and they tell the story as how they knew her, and not how the press thought they knew her. We get to know the fragile girl who "just wanted to be loved" and see her path towards her inevitable end, with participation of her destructive relationships as her absent father, her bad-influence husband and her addiction.

While we see the changes in Amy we see the changes in her music. Her music started off as a product of her personality, her smoky jazz, "I only write a song if it really means something to me" - Amy. But in the end her level of personality in songs has sunken just as much as her participation in shows. She couldn't handle the load up of all her personal problems and became only a mere shadow of the emotionally powerful chanteuse she once was. Her journey is an emotional roller-coaster of the bright Amy as we see her in the beginning of the movie and the addicted woman who just couldn't let go of heroin, ecstasy, cocaine and alcohol. They tried to make her go to rehab, but all she said was "No, no, no".

Although the emotional load up of this documentary is great, I do feel that it does show a selective side of the story. After I had seen the movie, I had the idea that everything that had come over Amy Winehouse was the result of her husband, parents, and the press. It is being presented as if Amy is a doomed angel because she is surrounded by the devil. This might be a peaceful thought for her close friends but I don't think it fully represents the truth.

But I am still amazed and overwhelmed by Amy's story and shocked how she went from the passionate and bright teenager she was, into a story about brilliance, depression, exploitation and addiction.

This movie is just as much as a worthy remembrance to Amy Winehouse as a representation of many celebrities who suffered from the pressure, the press and the fame-industry.

Mare P.

I saw this at the NXNE festival in Toronto last night. The movie was quite long, I must admit I was exhausted when I left. Not in a negative way, but overwhelmed at everything I had seen. The director had a lot of material to give us and he didn't hold back. The scene that I found the most powerful was the one in the recording studio with Tony Bennett, it was pure magic. I can't say that I followed Amy Winehouse, or was very familiar with her work, other than the song 'Rehab'. I did love her hairdo, it reminded me of the Ronettes. I am always fascinated by artists and how they develop.

We get a close up of Amy's artistic process. Her power was in her ability to constantly come up with song material that resonated with her at the deepest level and put those words to music. Combine this with a unaffected personality and an amazing ability to connect with an audience and you have a true force of nature. On the negative side, she had to deal with her personal daemons from her childhood. The tragedy was her use of drugs and alcohol. One gets the feeling from the movie of an almost inevitability of her path, but I guess that is always debatable.