As for her father, Mitch, it was kind of him to pay her a visit when she was unwinding in Saint Lucia, but less kind of him to drag along, by way of extra baggage, a film crew, thus eliciting from his daughter the pitiful plea, “Be nice to me on camera.” Then, there is Blake Fielder-Civil. She was bulimic, but her parents failed to take the condition seriously. “Amy” is, to a dismal degree, a compilation of scoundrels, taking us through all those who screwed her up, dragged her down, or failed to intervene. But heartless hacks were not the only hunters. This insured that Winehouse, scarcely the most elusive of quarries, would be chased, flushed out, and torn asunder. What documentaries will look like ten or twenty years from now, when every life, prominent or otherwise, will pullulate with digital traces, one shudders to think.Īnother unfortunate coincidence: when Tony Blair’s government outlawed hunting with hounds, in 2004, it somehow forgot to extend the ban to the British press. The camera was presumably a camcorder, of the kind that shrank in size and grew in ubiquity through the nineties, and Winehouse, by a stroke of lousy luck, entered the giddying spirals of her ordeal just as iPhones fell into the moist palms of the public. At one point, she waves a little bag of weed at the lens, like a devil caught in mid-temptation. “We’re in Brighton,” she announces, or “I’ve just been smoking a fag,” as if that were a notable occurrence. To judge by the footage, she and her pals, like pals everywhere, liked to film each other hanging out, sitting in cabs, and doing next to nothing. Winehouse was born in 1983, into the first generation for whom privacy was more of a joke than a right, let alone a haven. If you want to know what makes Kapadia’s method possible, well, consider the dates.
Nobody is filmed in a studio, musing maturely on wild or regrettable events what compels Kapadia are reports from the front line-Winehouse in full blaze at a jazz club, swooping into a volley of scat, or, at the butt end of her career, sitting down onstage in Belgrade, soused and spent, not caring to perform, in front of fifty thousand fans. We just flit or lurch from one happening to the next, and, although there are talking heads, most of the talking is done in clips from the archive.
In common with Kapadia’s last movie, “Senna,” a race through the life and lap times of the Brazilian Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna, there is no narrator to link the images and tranquillize the mood.
The death was ghastly, untimely, but scarcely unforeshadowed she had flirted with mortality, as does anyone with a sweet tooth for heroin and crack cocaine. It speeds us from Winehouse the teen-ager to the hubbub of her glory, and thence to her no less infamous passing, drenched in alcohol, in 2011, at the age of twenty-seven. Asif Kapadia’s film provides answers, of a sort.