Amy (M). Director: Asif Kapadia. Starring: Amy Winehouse. 108 minutes
'Celebrities, it sometimes seems, are public property,' I wrote back in July 2011, days after the alcohol-related death of pop singer Amy Winehouse at the age of 27. 'Their work enters the public consciousness, and moves or brings joy to many. We feel that the art that has moved us, in some way belongs to us. And because the art is conflated with the artist, the artist belongs to us too.'
On the occasion of such a celebrity's death, this sense of ownership, I noted, tended to give rise to contrasting but related phenomena: of disproportionate levels of grief on the one hand; and unspoken permission to make poor-taste jokes, at the expense of a dead human being, on the other. Both these phenomena were evident in public conversation in the wake of Winehouse's death.
'But the Winehouse we feel we own, and therefore feel justified in either grieving or disparaging, is not Winehouse,' I wrote. 'Celebrity sees humanity fragmented by fickle relevancy and diffused by media. The public persona is a product of our own perceptions, and is both illusory and transitory.' This 'obvious truth … ought to be regularly revisited' — celebrities are people too, and deserve dignity.
Certainly these thoughts bear revisiting upon the release of a new documentary about the singer's life. In 2011, the same year as Winehouse's death, British filmmaker Kapadia released a gripping, heartbreaking documentary, Senna, about the career and tragic death of Brazillian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna. His film about Winehouse, Amy, is equally as gripping and still more heartbreaking.
Just as Senna was composed from archival television footage, Amy's visuals are constructed almost entirely from archival and home video footage and still photographs. There are few talking heads and no formal narration; instead, Kapadia weaves the voices of Amy's friends and colleagues, and recordings of Amy's own voice, into a nearly stream-of-consciousness retelling of her story.
The approach has its drawbacks. At times, clarity is sacrificed to momentum. But generally it is very engaging, even spine-tinglingly effective. One sequence portrays the events of a doomed relationship, using photographs of Amy and a young man cavorting in a park. Her friends reflect in voiceover on the intensity of the relationship, and on its drawbacks; notably, that the man had another girlfriend.
Once we've heard of this relationship's ugly end, Kapadia segues to footage of Winehouse in the studio