At Glastonbury this year, the late night chat turned to one famous face whose absence saddened us all: Amy Winehouse. She of the beehive, tattoos, bad boyfriends and, most importantly, that distinctive, whisky-fuelled, jazz growl that propelled the North London Jewish girl to global stardom before she died in 2011. This year, the conversation focused less on memories of past gigs, and more on a controversial new film, that charts her rise and fall.
Amy is directed by BAFTA winner Asif Kapadia, whose previous films include Senna, his acclaimed portrait of the life of Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna. For Amy he uses the same collage-style documentary technique—weaving together clips from unseen home movies, interviews with family and friends, as well as the backstage footage of a bedraggled and emaciated Winehouse that were splashed across the press towards the end of her life. Kapadia successfully blurs the boundaries between straight documentary and biopic, bringing this talented and tragic figure, with her heavy Cleopatra eye make-up and mockney twang, back to life.
This is an Amy Winehouse we never knew. The funny, feisty teenager who plays a killer game of pool, does her make-up backstage in the loos of tiny jazz clubs and is desperate to move out of her mum’s house so she can smoke weed. The girl who used music to escape the pain of her parents’ divorce, which, contrary to her father Mitch Winehouse’s view as expressed in the film, she clearly struggled with—citing it as a trigger of the depression and bulimia that plagued her later years.
Much of the film’s most memorable footage is provided by her former manager and life-long friend Nick Shymansky, who met Winehouse when she was 16. He was clearly devoted to her. His wedding was scheduled to take place the day after she died on 23rd July 2011. Their relationship soured around the time she began her on-off affair with her future husband Blake Fielder-Civil, who admits to introducing her to hard drugs. They wanted to disappear into their own world, but their excessive substance abuse turned the romance toxic.
Shymanasky was the first of Winehouse’s inner circle to trust Kapadia. Speaking at a screening on Thursday at the East End Film Festival, Kapadia said: “I’d already asked him if he had any footage, and he said no. But once he heard me out, he said ‘look I’ve got this video and this video'…all that stuff from the beginning of her performing and them hanging out in the car… it was almost a revelation. I hadn’t seen that girl before. It’s not the best shot footage but the intimacy of her doing her makeup in the loo, sitting in the car, sleeping, talking to him and therefore talking to the audience—you don’t get that kind of access to someone now unless its done subconsciously and this wasn’t fake—her chatting to Nick was real.”
The film’s biggest revelation also comes from Shymansky. He was the person who tried to make her go to rehab, an incident later immortalised in the famous song. Shymansky claims he bundled the singer into a car and drove her to a deserted spot outside London in an attempt to stop her spiralling into further drug and alcohol addiction. According to Shymansky, Winehouse agreed to get help if her father said it was necessary. When they arrived at Mitch’s house, Shymnasky claims she sat on her father’s lap and manipulated him into saying she was fine. “I knew at some point she’d write a really big hit, and it was ironic that the hit she wrote was, verbatim, that day, and it was mocking me,” said Shymansky in an interview with The Guardian.
In the film, the music provides the narrative. Kapadia makes us re-examine her lyrics, scattering them across the screen in handwritten font adorned with childish hearts and doodles. We move through the rawness of her debut single, Stronger Than Me, which is a reflection on a feeble early lover, to her heartbreaking final single, Love is a Losing Game, which has a poetic, lament-like quality to it: “Played out by the band, Love is a losing hand.” “Though I battle blind, Love is a fate resigned.”
Was the film made too soon? Along with Mitch Winehouse’s claim that his portrayal is excessively negative, this is one of the charges levelled against this beautifully made and poignant film. Kapadia refutes the criticism. He says his only goal was to tell Winehouse’s story as honestly as possible. “Anyone who has seen the film will say—is the dad to blame?” he said. “Is the mum to blame? Is the music industry to blame? Is the paparazzi to blame? Are we complicit in watching this movie and watching the tragedy consume her in the newspapers? There’s no finger pointing—we are all guilty.”
Amy is hard to watch. I have never shed so many tears in a cinema. Why does this talented woman still exert such a pull? Partly, it’s the sadness that we will never hear her sing live again, that we’ve been cheated out of albums three, four and five. And the sense somehow that for people of my age now in our thirties, we felt part of her world. “It felt like it was very much a film about this city, about London, and specifically North London and Camden,” said Kapadia. “I felt a part of it…I hadn’t made a film at home for a long time and this felt like the right subject, because she was like the girl next door…I could have gone to school with her, I could have bumped into her somewhere. I never met her, I never saw her [sing] live but it still felt like it was a personal story.”
Amy is released in cinemas nationwide from today
