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| Amy Winehouse on the poster for Asif Kapadia's Amy |
Amy is, without question, the most talked about and hottest documentary of the year so far.
Amy Winehouse is just a big girl with family and mental issues and a very rare musical and vocal gift, when she makes her first album, which sets her on a course that ultimately costs her her life about 8 years later.
Subject Amy Winehouse touched a lot of people with her candid, self-written songs and confident, throw-back soul and jazz beats, when she debuted with Frank (2003), and hit the mainstream with Back to Black (2006), her second and final album.
Amy is directed by English director Asif Kapadia (Senna (2010)), who presents her story chronologically, using a mix of private videos, - Winehouse and her friends shot lots of videos throughout the years, which come to great use here, - media output from her performances, interviews and public sightings.
Amy breaks your heart.
It is the story of a very troubled young woman, whose problems persist and build, as none of the people around her take them serious enough. Basically Amy reveals that Amy Winehouse was mentally ill for all the years that we, the public, knew her. That she should have been cared for long before she began to be. And that the pressures and volatility of the monstrous media machine that goes along with a career as a music phenomenon helped to crush a great talent.
Kapadia's biggest achievement may be that he gathered all the material for the film and attained all the necessary clearances and participations of Winehouse's nearest family and friends, who must surely have been agonizing to deal with for months on end. Another stroke of genius, I think, is that he does not use any talking heads, but just lets the subjects tell their stories about Winehouse (with ample title cards, so we know who's talking), while video footage keep playing. This allows her to stay the focus of the film, and bars it from delving into being principally about her surroundings.
Amy lets us enjoy Winehouse's singing and her incredible songs, which we gain an insight into that we didn't previously possess, if we didn't know intimate details of her life, relationships and mentality. This makes her songs more heartbreaking than they otherwise were. - I for one will have to wait a long period to hear her songs again simply for this reason.
As the film begins its slow movement towards the abyss that is Winehouse's early demise, one can't withstand an urge to look for the guilty ones. Sure, Winehouse made her own choices to some degree, and brought herself down, but she was 'helped' by especially two repugnant figures that couldn't have been closer to her than they were: Her father, absent and self-admittedly a "coward" in her childhood, who (unsurprisingly) doesn't attain great fatherhood skills as his daughter walks on the edge as a drug-addicted money-machine. (Father Mitch has, naturally, attacked the film, and called it "preposterous", "misleading" etc. - with no real result.) - And Winehouse's numbskulled boyfriend and later husband Blake, who is the one to introduce his weak-minded, obsessing girlfriend to crack-cocaine and heroine and milk her for money for his own addiction and gross lifestyle.
Thirdly the tabloid medias that made Winehouse's life a surreal and circus-like encampment share some blame, and during some of the many clips of paparazzi madness in Amy, I pondered to myself what kind of people these disgustingly immoral vultures really consider themselves to be.
It is dubious if the culture has changed or learned anything from the case of Amy Winehouse, - aside from having been given some first class songs. But perhaps Amy can sum up some of the dangers of the business for coming artists, promoters and managers who should take much better care of young stars than was the case here. - Bulimia, depression and other mental illnesses are not to be slighted, especially not in a young person!
Amy also serves as a stand-out portrait of one of the clearest (and, regrettably, most short-lived) shooting stars of the 21st century as well as a harrowing depiction of the bottomless darkness that is addiction. - Take your teenage kid to it, if you want to teach him/her a serious lesson about these issues.
Amy left me short of breath and devastated. It is one of those masterpieces that's hard to recover from for a long while, and which I might never see again, simply because of its despairing power.
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Cost: 2.3-3.1 mil. $
Box office: 14.3 mil. $ and counting
= Big hit
[Amy has taken the world by storm, in documentary-scope: After screenings in Cannes and the Edinburgh Film Festival, it has received ecstatic reviews everywhere and attained the highest-grossing opening weekend for a documentary to date in Winehouse's native England, where it made 519k £ in its first three days. To date, it has made more than 5 mil. $ in the UK and nearly 7 mil. $ in North America. Kapadia looks like a filmmaker to look out for; he is already in post production with his next project at the moment, drama feature Ali and Nino (2015).]
What do you think of Amy?
Please, share your thoughts on the review, if you've seen the film
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