Lorna Irvine reviews a documentary that is 'by turns illuminating and frustrating in equal measure'.
A North London Jewish girl with a small frame, beehive hair and huge womanly voice, Amy Winehouse's story is only a cliché because clichés are often true. Her rise to fame in her early twenties with the unique polished hybrid of girl group/jazz-inflected pop made her an icon, but she was, nonetheless, a mass of insecurities and self-doubt, as with so many budding stars.
This film by director Asif Kapadia is by turns illuminating and frustrating in equal measure. It is excellent in its lack of narration, leaving it to Winehouse herself to tell the story, and her friends.
The footage of her as a young, pretty and healthy teenager, goofing around with best friends Lauren Gilbert and Juliette Ashby, is heart-rending in its sweetness, as a foreshadowing of the pop treadmill which was to ultimately destroy her in 2011. She was happiest, prior to husband Blake Fielder (they divorced in 2009) whom she met in 2005...a young man with a terrible reputation who introduced her to heroin and doesn't seem too concerned about that fact--at least, not on camera.
Her humour and ferocious intelligence is well-starred: those huge feline eyes rolling when one clueless interviewer speaks of Dido's 'meaningful' lyrics, and her acerbic reaction to Justin Timberlake's award nomination are hilarious, as well as her interview with Jonathan Ross at around the time of debut album Frank' s release where she quips, ''they wanna mould me into a shape... a triangle... nah, I can't do that!''
Such stubborn individualism lies at the paradox of Winehouse's story. Her raw, lucid lyrics float out above her on the screen like diary entries: little, lost chunks of her heart in loopy girlish scrawls. An old soul with a little girl's capacity for hurt. She wanted to have lots of people hear her play, had been a jazz fan as long as she was a teenager, yet was encouraged to ditch the guitar and make her sound more commercially viable.
The fame that grew into a tabloid frenzy led to record company, management and even family (her highly morally dubious dad Mitch, who has major issues with the film's release) closing ranks around her when she most needed treatment for her crack and alcohol addiction. Even mum Janis thought, for reasons best known to herself, that her bulimia would pass. But it seems damaged people have damaged kids. Allegedly, it was her parents' divorce that was the root cause of her hurt, although their love for her is evident.
Of course, we know how her short tragic life played out--a spell in St Lucia away from the media circus had restorative properties, only for her to slip back into addiction until her death at just 27 years old in 2011. The shot of her bewildered state at the Grammy Awards says it all--she's sat, slumped, blank-eyed and utterly alone.
But the film often seems to relish her life through a lens--even her friends, such as first manager Nicky Shymansky, film her constantly. It's like a hall of broken mirrors, with a distorted view of the young, increasingly vulnerable woman. It's claustrophobic, exhausting and devastating. Zoom-ins, particularly those of her getting intimate with Fielder and worst of all her tiny dead body being carried off, are pornographic in the extreme. The camera just won't leave her shrinking frame alone.
Better to remember her as the vivacious, gobby, singular talent she was, cracking one-liners and singing her heart out with that impish smirk, before she trod ''a troubled track''.
Amy screens across Scotland and is at the GFT until July 16th. www.glasgowfilm.org
Amy official trailer: http://youtu.be/Za3lZcrzzcM
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