Amy is a biographical documentary of the singer Amy Winehouse, but it is also a horror film. Watching it is like watching a ghost, a confused, tortured ghost of a woman who has boundless talent in singing and none in living. As we watch Amy Winehouse -- in home video footage, concert recordings, TV interviews, etc -- it hits us that we're watching her being killed slowly at every passing minute; killed by herself, her addiction, and by the cruel ecosystem of the fame industry that feeds first on her gift then more voraciously on her downfall. This is one of the best documentary films this year, and in some parts it's also one of the hardest to watch.
Amy
A documentary directed by Asif
Kapadia.
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The director is Asif Kapadia, whose previous doc, Senna, is about the F1 driver who also died young. In that film as well as in this new one, Kapadia assembles a life narrative almost entirely of archival materials: VHS home movies, gig footage, still photography, mobile phone clips, paparazzi shots, and without the traditional "talking head" testimonies. Winehouse's friends, managers, family members and industry peers give voice interviews that form the arc of the story, with the singer's confessional lyrics grounding the emotional landmark of her short life. And yet it's the visuals -- and our knowledge that she was found dead in her London home in 2011, at 27, from alcohol poisoning -- that gives the film a foreboding air, with Winehouse teetering on a knife's edge while we watch (and hope) that she will never fall headfirst and hit the blade, which she eventually does.
Amy Winehouse at her peak as a singer. Photos: Festival de Cannes
But Amy is not a miserabilist's trip into a genius' suicidal hell. It's a heartbreaking story, and its pervading sadness comes from the way we slowly realise the vulnerability of a life -- from the very first scene of a home video showing the teenage Amy singing Happy Birthday with that soulful reverberation people would come to cherish -- and that this is a woman who's in touch with her deep essence when she sings. Music, at the risk of sounding clichéd, is her soul -- how can it be anything else? -- and yet music, or the business of music in the 21st century, is what partly drives her into the darkest recesses of her own mind. Her music is beautiful, sure, but a lot of things we see here are plain ugly.
Teenage Amy Winehouse.
That's because Kapadia had full access to the video and sound archives from Universal Music, as well as from Winehouse's family and closest friends, and the director milks them to the max for this 127-minute film. We're now in an era of promiscuous clip-taking and this doc, compiled from materials created just before our mania for personal video, seems like an archaeological project that unearths images and sounds that otherwise would have been left meaningless. Here, we see young Amy as a precocious jazz singer crooning Moon River in a bar; Amy, so natural and confident, strumming and singing her jazz-funk song to the executives at Island Records, after which they duly signed her; Amy in a studio, drinking and singing and suffering from bulimia; Amy with her husband Blake Fielder-Civil, a seductive, sinister influence in the singer's life who says on record that he's the one who introduced her to hard drugs. The couple are, in his words, self-destructive by nature, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
In narrative terms, Blake is the chief villain. But the dark intrigue of the film is how we come to feel that everyone is complicit in Winehouse's spectacular disintegration, especially after her huge success with Back To Black. Her father, Mitchell, left the family when Amy was two but returned to work with her once her career took off, and in the film he comes across alternately as a caring dad and an opportunist (Winehouse's family disassociated themselves from the film after they had initially supported it). The grinding demands of the music industry meant Winehouse had to perform Rehab hundreds of times even when she no longer felt like it. And of course, the tabloid vultures who stalked her "like predators upon its prey"; they love her beehive hairdo, her mascara-messed face, her bruises, her eating disorder, her foul-mouthed retorts, her public breakdown, all of which is a first-rate freak show for the paparazzi -- and to an extent, for us.
By making a movie about it and using all the private footage, Amy, like many documentary films, flirts with the same dilemma of benefiting from her life (and death). What saves it is that, while Winehouse is seen here as self-sabotaging, this is at heart a sympathetic film about a troubled figure, so talented, so misunderstood, and so unfit to handle the complications of fame. At times you'll cringe at the brutality of what's happening, but it's likely that by the time you hear the final song Winehouse sings, you'll cry. That's rare for a film haunted by a tragic ghost.
