Amy: Revetting, poignant, moving & real

Starring: Amy Winehouse, family and friends

Rated: 9.5/10

When Amy was 14, she had no addictions but music, specifically jazz. Born with a gifted voice and what her mother felt was a mind all her own, Amy grew up — and died — disastrously after reaching heights of affection, affliction, fame, obsessions and finally a relationship which drew her into the arms of death at a very young age of 27. Almost everybody except for her two friends and the ex-manager really cared for her the way they should have and the self-abuse, alcoholism, hounding media, doomed marriage, crack cocaine, alcohol and bulimia just got together too tightly around her for her to have any real chance of survival. When the British jazz singer died in her flat in 2013, she sat on a pile of six Grammy’s but a much bigger pile of the rubbish of life and fame she had gathered around herself quite as inexorably as she had gathered music around her.

Celebrated documentary filmmaker Asif Kapadia captures the poignant turbulence that held this legendary singer with a booming voice and a penchant for personalised lyrics to ransom. It’s a documentary that not only makes you feel sad and bad for what happened to Amy but also pushes you into questioning the mores of society, fame and a relentless media, preying on the vulnerabilities of a very sick woman.

Her family, especially her father Mitch Winehouse, has since been openly critical about how he has been shown negatively in the film but the 100s of interviews that the filmmaker has taken and the real time footage too shows him up and his hunger for his “golden goose” in many of the aspects — like him advising her to not go to rehab when she desperately needed it (the resultant song and lyrics got her 3 Grammy Awards), him not managing her professional engagements well when she was driven to the brink by the paparazzi and the hectic unrelenting schedule (“Leave me alone, and I will do my music” she is shown as saying at one place) and him carrying a crew all the way to St Lucia where Amy was taking an extended break while her husband was incarcerated for hiding evidence in some case.

Amy died young, thanks to her marriage and the resultant push by her husband into falling to the fatal concoction of crack cocaine, heroin and alcohol which finally consumed her completely despite a short stint with rehab.

All this and much more is captured quite movingly and candidly by Kapadia who uses the same technique he did with his Award-sweeping earlier documentary Senna, based on the life and times of iconic Formula 1 racer Ayrton Senna. Amy is played by Amy herself and to have actually got all her friends, foes, business associates, family members, managers, bodyguards and all others connected to her all through or at any point of her life, and then juxtaposing this real talk with hours of real footage and then tabulating it into a finely edited documentary is no mean achievement,

It is Kapadia’s cinematic genius combined with his utmost sensitivity to the subject under his scrutiny that gives Amy all the volatility of emotions and drama, none of which is meant to play to the gallery or create unnecessary drama to sell Amy, like the media did eventual selling her life away.

A must see because for Amy and what she and we did to her. Twenty seven is no age to die, and definitely not when it is a genius who had a long way to go.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 12 July, 2015