I walked into the cinema to watch Amy,the documentary directed by Asif Kapadia of Senna fame, with the oddest sense of trepidation crawling ominously across the floor of my belly. It was the oddest; most uncomfortable feeling, and with a start, as I made myself comfortable with my diet coke pressed to my lips in anticipation, I realised it was the first time I had felt such a way since Amy had died.
I feel like I should preface this review with respect to the reader of being aware that I was quite the Amy Winehouse fan. In essence; this statement is almost entirely reductive; in reality I was borderline obsessed. Like many others, i poured over her stunning, ethereal lyrics like they held the keys to the universe; those witty, painfully-clever,plaintive miaows of hers resonating deeply with me at the time, as they did any poor soul who had ever been heartbroken. Her voice was other-worldly, this was obvious from the beginning, and while not taking anything away from her obvious vocal talent, it was her writing that got me. The power of her lyrics is as vital in our British cultural make up as any Shakespearian sonnet, and I defy anyone who states otherwise. In essence, it was the gritty, authenticity of Amy that grabbed my attention somewhere around 2007, and held it firmly until the day of her death in 2011, as me and my mum sat inside on a beautiful summers day, staring blankly, numbly, at the television as her tiny body was removed from her home in Camden Square.
The anxiety I felt was familiar; I remember it from before, when I opened a newspaper and cringed, clicked on a website and saw her decline in lurid, sensational detail. I felt like that again in the cinema as the trailers rolled, anxiously bouncing my leg and chewing the straw of my drink. Please be good, i chanted in my head. Please, please be good.
AMY takes the viewer on an incredible journey, opening as she sings Happy Birthday to her friend, aged fourteen, a lollipop hanging from her lips, her eyes wide and clear, her innocence as vitally present as you and I,right now. This footage from before Amy was famous is mind-boggling to me, all the way up to her promotional tour of her debut album Frank, there is literally reams and reams of existing material available, and i watch, open-mouthed as this story unfurls, almost disbelieving that this material has existed for so long with no prior public knowledge. Upon closer inspection, it seems like Amy’s true legacy has been preciously guarded by a few friends, who closed rank completely when she died, their iron-clad loyalty only adding to Amy’s inadvertent authenticity. Asif Kapadia reveals in an interview that all of them refused to talk unless her trusted and revered bodyguard, Andrew Morris would. This raises the ghost of a glow within me, because quite frankly, I really rate that kind of loyalty. It appeals to my romantic nature, and apparently it did to Amy as well. For, for all the hangers on, and Blake—asites as i like to dub them, there was still a close ring of people around her, dipping and weaving between each other and Amy, throughout the ten years that the film’s timeline spans; never wavering, alone but together in their anguish and frustration, all the time harbouring all this footage and information,this gilded treasure that they obviously held so dear.
And I really could never blame them. Amy is funny and silly, vibrant and so shockingly alive in that footage, footage that switches from candid conversations and mucking around with her friends; to swaying slowly with a guitar on stage, that glorious voice resonating in every corner of the theatre, as well as my mind, so it felt. So much of the casual footage taken in pub toilets as she did her make up for a gig, on holiday with her friend, was just so tragically ordinary, it made me suck in my breath.
I completely endorse and respect Kapadia’s method of film-making in itself, the banishment of talking heads and regular interviews creates an incredibly intimate experience as we watch AMY,more often than not in close-up, every twitch of her face and curl of her lips highlighting her vitality, her presence, her vitality. The use of establishing shots over key locations such as Camden, East Finchely, and New York successfully oriented the viewer with the setting of Amy’s life, creating an illusion of being in the now, strolling through her life with her. There was subtle use of symbolism in the film which I would describe as dignified and un-contrived; from the paparazzi shots of her emerging from a doorway, one after the other, only to reveal in the last shot Blake ominously lurking behind her, back in her life after a period of creativity and success. The shot where she wins a Brit Award and walks towards the stage while hundreds of hands grab at her tiny, diminutive frame was a successful foreshadowing of things to come, a haunting reminder that we are not merely on a journey of shiny commercial success, but a runaway train of which we all know the outcome.
The next half of the film documents this with the drip,drip,drip of a leaking faucet that you know disguises a burst pipe somewhere, just like we know the outcome of this madness, this toxicity that plagues our unlikely heroine.
The presence of Blake Fielder-Civil in Amy’s life is prefaced with footage of him chatting cockily to the camera, while the voiceover of a club promotor drones what Blake was like back then: “He likes drinking…gigs…shagging. Always in and out of beds. A right lad,least he thought he was”, reads the original transcript, while a spotty, skinny Blake, youthfully gormless in a fedora with the obligatory fag hanging from his gob, brags to the camera about how many birds he has pulled in that particular pub. Never having done much research or digging previously on the since-then demonised double-barrelled public school boy, it was almost amusing to me to see the obvious vulnerabilities of someone that the media have so successfully turned into a pantomime figure; a bogey man out to junk-ify your daughter. Instead, while Blake painfully fails to redeem himself in any way to the viewer, he instead comes across as an idiot, a baby, spoiled and coddled, desperate and attention seeking; and above all, completely unable to cope with his glaring insignificance in comparison to Amy. In my opinion, the film left him as someone to be reviled, yes, but not to be feared in the slightest. Blake admits readily in the voice-over that he introduced Amy to crack cocaine and heroin, and through painfully lurid pap pictures, we see their relationship implode in almost apocalyptic fashion. Those shots of Amy throughout the duration of 2007 were the ones I was most afraid of seeing again- skeletal, bleeding, crying, clearly deeply troubled and distressed. To his credit however, Kapadia depicts these in snapshot form under the harsh flash of the ever-present cameras which were to define the latter part of Amy’s life. Rather than glorifying the clear deterioration of her mental health this technique served to highlight the true beacon of vitality she radiated in previous parts of the film-thus I deem them completely necessary in the telling of Amy’s story.
It is around this point in the film that i realised, with a jolt, that this isn’t just a film about Amy, this is a film about us. The voice over of her best friend and former manager, Nick Shymansky, mixes wearily with footage of the likes of Frankie Boyle and Jay Leno as they ridicule her state of mind and appearance. His voice appears clenched somehow, as though he grits his teeth through his words: “It was suddenly acceptable to ridicule a bulimics appearance, and make fun of her obvious addictions”, he seethes through residual pain for his friend, who close friends report he treated like a precious family member. “It was like a feeding frenzy. It was disgusting”.
It was then that I really began to appreciate the intricacy and intent of Kapadia’s film making. Instead of leading with an angle, this film was committed to utmost honesty it seems, and rather than the audience have a point of view forced on them, the truth gleams and twinkles almost painfully, and becomes a social observation of this media-driven world we live in. How we love to build someone up, then sneer and laugh raucously as they fall. How dare someone gifted have problems? Let alone with mental health? We in Britain do not court mental health as a serious illness the way we do cancer, in fact it is a frivolous and self-indulgent affliction according to the media, and indeed to some of the general public. It is worth mentioning at this point the scientifically proven intrinsic link between mental health and addiction, between mental health and eating disorders. You simply do not have one without the other. I watched in horror as Kapadia sifted through the medias mauling of a young girl, clearly at the precipice of something terrible, staggering around, lost in a world she no longer knew how to inhabit.
The closing of the film is like watching a car-crash, the inevitability of the ending that we know will come seemingly dragged out painfully, achingly. I found myself wishing I could pluck her from the screen, spirit her away from the fate we know awaited her. The camera shot of Amy’s body being removed from her home on the afternoon of the day she died is physically breath-taking, and again highlights the glaring paradoxes that Kapadia has woven between the inherently vital and present girl at the beginning of the film, to the hollow, terrified husk she would become.
Grief and loss creates hindsight between us, of course, and with Amy’s death, for me, the lowly member of the public, grief for a talent so intense breaks our hearts wide open, and in the midst of the despair there can be a sense of exhilaration somehow bursting through the veil of life. Droplets of blistering clarity illuminate before you, and it is this clarity that engulfs me as I quietly leave the theatre, inadvertently holding my heart through my Fred perry polo, which I wore in vague homage to Amy. I can only really hope against hope that others feel this clarity as keenly as I did, and this need I feel for responsibility in the media, for compassion in mental health and addiction, for peace when most just want to dig for dirt and filth.
Amy could have been anyone with a dream and a talent. Over all, my overwhelming feeling as I left the film was that it was just so, so lovely to see her again.
