Amy

Mired in controversy during her short life, so after her death Amy Winehouse continues to have the power to provoke discussion and recrimination. Now in a new two-hour documentary, called simply “Amy”, director Asif Kapadia has set out to rescue the singer from the popstar-comes-to-grief-after-being-catapulted-to-stardom narrative that has inevitably grown up around her. Through a series of video clips and recordings – some messy, some undeniably touching – the film chronicles the eventful life of an artist many feel could have gone on to become a bright star in the world of jazz/R&B. Kapadia’s decision to dispense with a narrator makes the story of her all-too-short life all the more powerful, his technique of running Amy’s hand-scribbled lyrics on screen a highly effective way of underlining the autobiographical nature of everything she wrote.

Inevitably, any film about Amy Winehouse will explore the singer’s troubled personality, the bulimia, the addictive behaviour. But Kapadia balances this by giving us a sense of the ‘real’ Amy – funny, vivacious, spontaneous. Of all the testimonies provided for the making of this film, the most touching is that provided by her closest friends. Much of the footage, including photos, home movies and phone messages, was made available to Kapadia by Amy’s best pal Lauren Gilbert. It includes the delightfully sweet rendition of Happy Birthday - sung by Amy at her friend’s 14th birthday party – which opens the film. Sadly, this footage from earlier, happier days has the effect of making her all too-rapid trajectory from sassy but fresh-faced teenager to vulnerable adult caught in the headlights of publicity, doubly poignant.

Fans of the singer will inevitably find much of the footage in this documentary difficult viewing – shots of an emaciated and clearly exhausted Amy supposedly ‘recuperating’ on St Lucia, clips featuring an arrogant Blake Fielder, happy to blame Mitch Winehouse for his daughter’s demise rather than acknowledge the role he clearly played in bringing about her destruction, and - saddest of all in my view - footage of the singer, mute, exhausted and confused refusing to sing at the notorious Belgrade concert of 2011. By this stage Amy fit the profile of ‘tortured artist’ in every respect. By her own admission: “the greater the pain, the better the song”. No surprise then that her superb album ‘Back to Black’, with all its unfortunate associations with one of the darkest periods of her life (Fielder’s decision to go back to his long-standing girlfriend), captures like no other album of recent years the pain and torment of unrequited love.

In the end, recriminations about who or what caused Amy’s demise are, of course, pointless. Speculation about who did or did not want Amy to go to rehab futile. Kapadia has not set out to moralise, but just to tell the story of a woman who was always, by her own admission, only really interested in “doing the music”. What he has created here is a watchable, though sad film - a sensitive homage to yet another lost talent.