Amy is a documentary film that captures the upward trajectory of the career of the soul singer Amy Winehouse only to look at the fall at the end quite in a hurry. In those moments, the audience first sees the truly entertaining and interesting part of the film. Its initial parts look like a story of a superstar singer who is trying to break into the world of show business. Any light entertainment, i.e. romantic comedy pops up when she hits success where Amy tries to crack jokes in interviews and falls in love with the wrong people. They have no sober conclusion though, shocking how, as one’s dreams come to fruition, they evolve into that horrific feeling of suffocating anxiety, at times psychosis, as the hard liquor, and drugs rule over people’s lives and dreams. Then as the end comes, owing to the fact that this is Biographical, and we see that Amy Winehouse was dead at 27 sings the beautiful music of angry dissonance, only to give way to heart breaking tragedy.
This is the film directed by Asif Kapadia, the author of many similar Senna and the greatest film Senna, and Knows the same Tactics in Documentary here. In this case, through the images he has made through time, and indeed video, sound and images of key characters in the life of winehouse such as interviews.
Meaning that the range of pictures bludgeoning Amy, or rather a bit of video, pictures Amy both before and after the hounded age, where her family members and friends, herself, prior to and particularly in certain bad months, and the press, who chased around Amy.
It arguably encapsulates all that is left of her short but extremely successful career in music, however, the one that likely has the most relevance is the home footage taken well before Winehouse was found. She was certainly having some troubles of her own by then – a sometimes depressing and bulimic lifestyle that the document accompanying this film touches upon – but what you do get to see is a cheerful and positive little girl, free of any peripheral hardware of popularity, performing at a friend’s 14th birthday party. It’s dreams of playing at tiny jazz venues in front of sparse crowds, and I imagine this is one of the few opportunities we perhaps come close to Amy for once in the film .
Interestingly, the film also emphasizes how absolutely funny she was, with jabs at Dido and Justin Timberlake which could induce a serious belly laugh, and a clip with a mock Spanish accent while she was on vacation in Majorca indicating that there was comedy in her personality and that it would have pursued her are music not worked out. But the moment you hear Aimee get on stage and sing, it is obvious to you that the music thing would always have worked, with the picture starting off with no other than a fourteen-year-old Amy singing My Heart in the music studios and a jaw-dropping scene where she is at her lowest and is able to record the vocal of Back to black. Having hearing this track only through her performance, the tenderness, confidence, and fragility of Winehouse is overwhelming at this moment in the song and when the final note is struck, amaze at how wistful she sounds even if it was intended to be entirely different.
It is becoming clearer that the actual gift didn’t only stop at the singing, in fact, the years of Amy’s life were also caught in her poetry; how often does one hear “an old lady in a young girl’s body?” “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head and I have to have it somewhere written down,” she says, and as if giving in to the temptation to make this boring narration interesting, Kapadia uses the words and songs; what Amy is singing.
Regrettably however, Amy is not just a fairytale of exceptional talent, but also a fairytale that has to do with the hidden aspects of being famous and being an addict, and although the film has no clear targets for blame it does let many of the main players put the case against them through their speeches.
Everything goes to sad when she settles in Camden and starts doing everything from alcohol to even drug use. But those begin to rise very excessively when she comes across Blake Fielder-Civil. It is an instant case of love at first sight and in no time affection turns into obsession and the several break-ups and make-ups only serve to make Amy worse. That period for their yo-yo relationship is when they first marry and she first tries heroine, his enabling her habit only to make the drug more deadly.
He is not the only person who had a bad influence on her, winehouse’s by then manager Raye Cosbert is also equally as bad for some portions of the film, gives encouragement for touring even when doctor’s advice to the contrary, with the consequence of the very pitiful live performance we see in the film. Even though her father Mitch has not been a fan of this film, it is obvious he had his reasons and this point also makes clear that he relished in the fame and money earned from his daughter’s achievements. Especially when she goes to St. Lucia to rehabilitate herself and her father arrives with his camera – baby, it’s tough to even like him, let alone love him.
Indeed, everyone had some issue to pursue or some agenda to fulfill around this pretty lost and very impressionable young lady and in part this was also because people enjoyed the stories of this girl with addiction of a sort and the suicidal incidents and the breakdowns and such that the press rushed to harass her even further. This is what makes the latter part of the film quite unbearable, that peppy, smart mouthing, cute and sincere little girl being replaced by a sad, tired, shriveled and broken woman. A stick-thin apparition possessed with a lost mind and a failing body.
With all the tension built up till that point, as it is becoming apparent that the story will soon come to a close, everyone who took part in it gets the heavy burden, Amy’s eventual death shown as not only the cause of her many tragic vices, but also the failure or refusal of people around her to do anything useful; and in a way, the blame lies with the society that stood and looked in horror and disgust yet more than a little amused at what happened.
The Verdict
There are moribund cautionary tales of life in A Star Is Born and addiction in Trainspotting and all other tedious stories of Los Angeles and Broadway involving a spoiled talented addict, but nothing compares to ‘Amy’. It is also a tribute to the legacy of a brilliant artist with dazzling footage showcasing her exceptional abilities as a songwriter and singer. In the end, however, it is the rightful tribute to Wildhorse that she has for the relations of Chanaaya and non that the thin-shinned press vacuums up, a caricature of a babyaiye; and a babyaiye who has no armor against the elements of the bow which life so craftily shoots at the unprepared.
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