Amy (2015)

Amy: Directed by Asif Kapadia. With Amy Winehouse, Lauren Gilbert, Juliette Ashby, Nick Shymansky. Archival footage and personal testimonials present an intimate portrait of the life and career of British singer/songwriter Amy Winehouse.

“A haunting, heartbreaking and stunningly brilliant film from Senna director Asif Kapadia, which takes us into the confidence of Amy Winehouse, as the bolshy, big-voiced, jazzy Jewish girl from North London becomes a megastar, while her personal demons, her relationship with a drug addict, and a ravenous, amoral press proceed to rip her to shreds.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThanks to an abundance of revelatory home video footage, soundtracked by incisive interviews, we see her not only as the beehived, cat- eyed chanteuse or the alarmingly ribbed tabloid quarry, tumbling out of a club at 3am, but as a shy, spotty teen with a seductive offhand confidence in her vocal gift.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIu0026#39;m not an enormous fan of Winehouseu0026#39;s music, I think because her deeply personal writing and distinctive, expressive voice tended to be masked by such contrived, Americanised pastiche – trading first on u0026#39;30s jazz and then u0026#39;60s girl groups – but the portrait that emerges here is uncompromising, thrilling and frequently devastating: of an unhappy girl equipped with a massive talent, but none of the stability or serenity to deal with the perpetual media storm that her success brought upon her.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eWe see stand-ups and TV presenters laughing at her bulimia and drug abuse, her management pushing her out of rehab and onto foreign stages, and – in the second half – a rapacious, vulturous paparazzi incessantly stalking her, an essential decency chillingly absent. If that was my job, I think I would struggle to watch this film and think: u0026quot;Yes, what I am doing with my life is essentially fine.u0026quot;u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBy contrast, Kapadiau0026#39;s film is quite beautifully lacking in sensationalism. Though it essentially doubles an indictment of a society almost entirely lacking in basic compassion and empathy, itu0026#39;s a work that possesses both virtues in apparently limitless amounts, surely compressing and simplifying an impossibly complex narrative, but attaining something that seems awfully like the truth – and apparently is, according to her closest friends.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAmy is a tough watch, but it feels essential, not just for its vivid picture of a fascinating, deeply troubled young woman, but also for its wider significance: as a plea for people to stop being so horribly selfish, to stop seeing excess and illness as u0026#39;rock and rollu0026#39; and drug abuse as a joke, and for the media to realise that if it wants to paint itself as a crusading Fifth Estate, then some basic humanity wouldnu0026#39;t go amiss.”