Why You Have To See The Amy Winehouse Documentary

4 July 2015 | 1:24 pm | Anthony Carew

The darker side of fame rears its dangerous, ugly head in a harrowing and humanising look at the rise and tragic fall of Amy Winehouse

AMY

In the documentary that, simply, bears her name, time and again Amy Winehouse —blue-eyed soul-belter turned tragic member of the 27 Club— says something that, in hindsight, lingers ironically, prophetically, eerily. “I don’t think I’m going to be at all famous,” she opines, at just 18, “I don’t think I could handle it. I’d go mad.” Later, when Winehouse’s debut album, 2003’s Frank, finds critical acclaim she says: “If I really thought I was famous I’d go top myself, nahmean. It’s a frightening thing, innit?”

If Asif Kapadia’s film, Amy, has a singular thesis, it’s that fame is a frightening thing. For all her vices and troubles —coke, crack, heroin, alcohol, bulimia, depression, self-harm— it’s fame that proves Winehouse’s undoing. Her life is lived inside “a horrible goldfish bowl”, the English singer hounded to her dying days by a bloodthirsty media mob. The film’s most evocative sequence isn’t any of the unseen footage of a young Winehouse, but a moment from the peak of her fame, and her infamy, where she’s merely trying to get out her front door, and an army of paparazzi surrounded her, the accumulated flashes firing in a barrage, the strobe-like effect turning the quotidian girl-on-sidewalk scene surreal, psychedelic.

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Whilst fame is the chief theme, the relationship between the artist and the camera is the subtext of Amy. Part of the reason that the film is so effective, so revealing, is that Winehouse spent her life in front of a camera, giving Kapadia a cache of archive footage to draw from. We see Winehouse as a child, at 14, in her giddy-and-gay salad days when she left home, playing her earliest shows. One shot of an 18-year-old Winehouse asleep in the back of a car —young, vulnerable, candid, demythologised— is precious, warmly human. Like Brett Morgen’s Cobain: Montage Of Heck, it digs into home movies and scribbled journals, wanting to find the real human being behind the cliché of the tragic rock’n’roller.

In that way, as film viewers, we welcome the presence of the camera in Winehouse’s life; are glad that all this archival footage means that Amy gets to avoid all those creaky clichés of the rockumentary. Yet, when the camera becomes an antagonist in her life’s story, the viewer is made complicit in her demise; all those paparazzi merely serving a gossip industry that serves up self-destructive starlets as pure titillation for its viewers.

Amy, itself, doesn’t exist beyond that; and, indeed, doesn’t distinguish between sources in its storytelling. The braying mob of gossip media may be a vague collective villain, but Kapadia paws over paparazzi photos of Winehouse and boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil as if examining iconographic art, and then uses creepy, from-a-‘respectful’-distance news footage from outside her funeral with full tenderness on tragic close.

All this thematic complexity means that Amy plays well whether you care about Winehouse’s music or not. In fact, maybe it plays even better if you think her Ronettes dress-ups and soul-music re-hash were a form of minstrelry; that her great ‘talent’ seemed more for mimickry (you should see her impersonate a Spanish maid, herein) than artistic truth.

Because, as Kapadia attempts to show the girl behind the beehive —the real person turned profitable spectacle of destruction and Jay Leno punchline— a disinclination for her music proves no impediment; perhaps, even, aids you to seeing the human being lost amidst the fame. Having seen the 14-year-old Winehouse —singing Happy Birthday to a friend in intimate video— for the rest of the film you can still see that little girl within her; lost in a toxic maelstrom of drugs and fame, in over her head. Once she becomes incredibly wealthy, she’s forever shepherded, sheltered, coddled, absolved from responsibility; her cluelessness perhaps, even, a beneficial state for those —like her father, Mitch— for whom she’s their sole source of income.

Her father comes across as, at best, a clueless opportunist, at worst, someone who put self-gain over his daughters’ wellbeing. If the villain of the piece is the camera-lens of fame, then Mitch is an enabler. One of the most drolly comic moments of the documentary comes when Winehouse, after an overdose and a string of disastrous public appearances, retreats to St. Lucia, living on the beach, far from the glare of the spotlight. Then, in walks this shitty father straight out of central casting, bringing along a camera-crew from his fledgling reality show My Daughter Amy, somehow oblivious to the fact that his behaviour is horrifying to said daughter, and hugely destructive to her psyche.

It’s a symbolic moment in a film filled with acts of parasitism and enabling, with hangers-on, cracked-out husbands, business-minded managers, concerned parties. The further Winehouse goes —Grammy wins, platinum sales, insane fame— the more can be squeezed from the cash-cow. Amy is both a critique of that behaviour, and a participant. Its artful attempt to capture the girl behind the myth is a piece of sublime, unsettling cinema, but it’s also yet another Winehouse product that others can profit from.