Old Yorker

Asif Kapadia (2015)

Asif Kapadia’s subjects are names big enough to make his recent biographical films unusual events in contemporary cinema – documentary features that attract a mainstream as well as an arthouse audience.   Senna took £375,000 on its opening weekend in the UK in 2011 and has now grossed around $10.9m worldwide.  Kapadia’s new film about Amy Winehouse (his first since Senna) last month broke the British box-office record for a documentary’s first weekend, taking £519,000.  Just four weeks later, its gross takings stand at $11.4m.   Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse were not only very famous and highly photogenic:  they were also shockingly short-lived.  Their premature deaths – Senna at thirty-four, Winehouse at twenty-seven – do more than intensify their charisma.  They give tragic definition and strong dramatic shape to their stories.

In preparing to make Senna, Kapadia struck gold when he was given access by Bernie Ecclestone to a wealth of Formula One archive material.  The footage of what went on behind the scenes, as well as on the track, at Grand Prix races contested by Senna gave the film the quality of live action drama and greatly helped Kapadia to cut down on the use of after-the-event interviews.  The result was a documentary compelling in its content and innovative in its form.  There are times early on in Amy when you sense Kapadia feels a pressure to repeat this formal novelty, seems to regard it as a point of honour not to resort to talking heads (except for those that appear in television interviews etc made during Amy Winehouse’s lifetime).  We hear interviews, though; and this involves repeated, slightly awkward (albeit usually necessary) reminders, through names on the screen, of who we’re listening to.  In place of the F1 archive in Senna, there are plenty of video clips of Winehouse’s offstage life, made by her friends or by colleagues in the music business.  Some of these clips offer engaging before-she-was-famous insights:  fourteen-year-old Amy sings ‘Happy Birthday to You’, jokily but impressively, to her friend Lauren; Amy, in her early twenties, is an anfitriona, conducting a guided tour of her holiday apartment.  (This Spanish lady impersonation is brilliant enough to make you feel Winehouse could have been a good actress as well as a great singer.)   Even so, not all the video footage tells us much; at first, you wonder if its main purpose is  to help Asif Kapadia sustain his evident commitment to a biography in the form of uninterrupted film archive.  By the time Amy Winehouse has become a well-known performer and recording artist, however, the video snippets are becoming something more.  They’re a reminder, one that’s unsurprising but nonetheless powerful to experience, of how fully a life, especially a celebrity life, is now a matter of audiovisual record.

Then there are the press cameras.  There were warning notices in Curzon Richmond about the flashlight photography in Amy.  The number of times I had to look away from the screen gave me a very third-hand sense of the relentless paparazzi attention to which Amy Winehouse was eventually subjected.; Sally, who didn’t shield her eyes, found this film gave her, like nothing she’d seen before, some idea of what it must be like on the receiving end of those flashing lights.  (My eyes were open to see Winehouse – when she first broke through in America, before she became media quarry – flinch, startlingly, from a camera flash.)  Asif Kapadia develops a cumulatively strong indictment of her treatment by the press and television, especially once she’s become publicly defined by her drink and drugs problems rather than her music.  She’s jeered at not only by British tabloids and ‘controversial’ stand-ups like Frankie Boyle but by the likes of Graham Norton too.  One of the latter’s American counterparts, Jay Leno, supplies a particularly egregious example of fickleness – in clips that show him welcoming the rising star Amy onto one of his shows, and making unfunny fun of her addiction problems on another.  This treatment seems more offensive because of what eventually happened to Winehouse; it also seems undeserved.  Of course it’s possible that Kapadia has chosen to omit evidence to the contrary but there’s nothing in Amy to suggest its subject was one of those celebrities who courted the media then cried foul when they turned against her.

Anthony Lane, in his online New Yorker review, had good things to say about the film but expressed reservations too – chiefly that:

‘What gets mislaid, amid the din, is the music. Her albums—“Frank” (2003) and “Back to Black” (2006)—are casually mentioned, undated, as if they were parties she had dropped into. Worse still, we barely hear her mete out a song in its entirety.’

I don’t think this is fair criticism.  Amy Winehouse’s art is hardly relegated to background music but Amy doesn’t purport to be an analysis of her singing or songwriting (and it would be premature, only four years after her death, to decide her place in the soul-R&B-jazz-pop pantheon).  It’s certainly convenient for a film-maker who made dramatic features before he turned to documentaries to see Winehouse’s career as largely a story of abuse – by people close to her, by the press and broadcast media, and self-inflicted – but it’s a legitimate approach.  Even if Anthony Lane were right, there would be a rationale for crowding out the music.   Winehouse insists – both in interviews included in Amy and in the BBC Arena programme (commended by Lane) about her performance at the ‘Other Voices’ festival in the remote Irish fishing village of Dingle, in 2006 – that she’d prefer to be left in peace to get on writing more songs and to perform them in small, informal venues.   (The Dingle performance was to an audience of fewer than a hundred people, in the village church.)   Asif Kapadia may be making the point that the trajectory of her fame and her personal life meant she wasn’t left in peace.  She didn’t write another album after Back to Black – to that extent, the music did take a back seat.

Amy is a bit too long – although, when you read how much footage Kapadia and his team sifted, you appreciate the end product is a drop in the ocean of Amy Winehouse’s life on film.  Perhaps because he’s had to work with a larger variety of video recordings, the narrative is not as effortless as that of Senna:  Kapadia occasionally seems to be straining to shape the dramatic arc of a story the unhappy ending of which you already know.  But he gives us many remarkable images, sequences and resonances.  Winehouse’s recording the vocal for the single ‘Back to Black’ is emotionally overpowering, in the juxtaposition of her singing (the melisma on ‘black’, especially) and, when she’s finished, her laughing, almost sheepish remark to the producer, Mark Ronson – ‘Ooh, that’s a bit sad, isn’t it …’   The recording (her last) of ‘Body and Soul’, with Tony Bennett for his 2011 Duets II album, isn’t much less poignant.  At one point, she thinks she can’t continue.  It makes matters worse that Bennett is one of her idols; what’s piercing here is how clearly she explains that to Tony Bennett, who responds with great tact and sensitivity.  At the notorious concert in Belgrade in June 2011, when she sits down and shuts up, even though the huge crowd is yelling at her to sing, there’s a look on her face that brings to mind the image of Amy as a kid, much earlier in the film.  That image accompanied words on the soundtrack from her mother, explaining that, from a young age, her daughter always decided what she was and wasn’t going to do.  Amy Winehouse comes across as a beguiling mixture of childlike and childish, waif and wanton.  She’s aggressively witty (‘gobby’, as someone describes her).   At public events like award ceremonies, she teeters about in high heels and skimpy dresses, almost overpowered by her huge hair – half-diva, half-little girl lost.

Amy’s father Mitch and ex-husband Blake Civil-Fielder have both complained that they are misrepresented in Amy.  If Asif Kapadia has chosen material specifically in order to show them in an unfavourable light, he has done it very successfully – so much so that it’s hard to imagine there exists evidence that would reflect more kindly on the pair.  It’s hard to see why Amy Winehouse was, in different ways, in thrall to these two men but Kapadia is probably wise not to try and solve that mystery:  most viewers, however infuriating they find Mitch and Blake, will accept that Amy’s attachments to them were as undeniable as they were irrational.   Her brother Alex is absent from the film – strikingly so, given how often his sister mentions in the Arena interview his influence on her developing musical tastes.   The BBC repeated this programme (Amy Winehouse: The Day She Came to Dingle) on the weekend of Amy’s release and I watched it a couple of days before seeing Kapadia’s film.  I was prepared, therefore, to hear her express her very definite opinions about the kinds of music and the musical performers she most loved.  When Winehouse talks, articulately and unequivocally, about the voice being a musical instrument and her preference for Sarah Vaughan to Ella Fitzgerald, I couldn’t disagree more (my preference is nearly always for the song, not the singer).  Since I don’t like jazz either, there’s a fair amount of my tastes that resists what Amy Winehouse was about.   But I think that ‘Back to Black’ is a great single and this film proves repeatedly that she was a gargantuan talent.  A dramatised biopic of this life will surely follow in time:  it’s good that Asif Kapadia has got Amy to the screen first.

9 July 2015