Asif Kapadia reveals Amy Winehouse's amazing contradictions in new documentary

Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy shows singer Winehouse desired success and feared stardom in equal measure

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      The video footage is grainy, the light is dim, the vibe mellow. Amy Winehouse is in her room at the Causeway addiction treatment centre on the U.K. island of Osea. She wears none of the signature Divine-on-a-bender mascara, there’s no mountainous hairdo or perilous stilettos. From behind the camera, we hear the voice of her then husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, goading the gifted neo-soul singer into performing for him.

      “Go on,” he says. “Sing ‘Rehab’. It’s only me watching.”

      She responds with a near whisper. She sounds like a child. Two years into her life as a global superstar, a rapidly unwinding public substance-abuser, and a tabloid piñata—like Judy Garland or Billie Holiday on vertiginous fast-forward—Amy Winehouse has already had enough. Her pleading eyes seem to fill the entire screen. “I don’t really mind it here,” she says. The vulnerability is enough to make you weep.

      “She seemed to be a very simple girl next door,” says Asif Kapadia, calling the Straight from Toronto. “I wanted to dispel all the iconic imagery of the beehive hair, and the makeup, and actually say, ‘Forget all that. It’s all BS. It was all a mask. It was all hiding the pain underneath it.’ ”

      Kapadia’s documentary Amy, opening next Friday (July 10), received standing ovations at Cannes and then again at its U.K. premiere in late June at Glastonbury. Arguably, it raises the bar on how much intimacy a film can achieve with its subject. Amy is a gutting experience, accomplished through a seamless patchwork of private home-video footage and the words of Winehouse’s closest colleagues—including childhood friends Juliette Ashby and Lauren Gilbert, for the first time ever, and original manager Nick Shymansky.

      The picture that emerges is depressingly familiar. A “gobby” (as Shymansky affectionately puts it) North London teen with an outsize talent is undone by the demands of a brutal industry, unwise management choices, and her own too-fragile emotional constitution. Her adolescent years are marked by domestic chaos, antidepressant medication, and bulimia. When international fame comes, it’s with a hit record that defiantly renounces treatment of her advancing alcoholism. Amy also gives the viewer a nauseatingly vivid sense of life inside the cruel and relentless gaze of the paparazzi.

      “What happened was almost like a huge-scale, international form of bullying,” states Kapadia, adding that the Amy Winehouse who finally broke into the North American market with her second (and last) album, 2006’s Back to Black, was already dangerously unwell.

      “By the time she became famous, particularly in the U.S. and Canada—you guys got her a bit later than we did—she’d closed down,” the London-based filmmaker says. “She never spoke. She didn’t give interviews. She didn’t talk to the audience.”

      Indeed, from the first time we all heard “Rehab” until the singer’s death five years later, in 2011, at the age of 27, Amy Winehouse was little more to us than the world’s leading train wreck. The speed of the descent was dizzying. Mercifully, Amy renders this melodramatic downfall into something more than collateral damage from the same fin-de-siècle Camden scene that vomited Pete Doherty into your lap.

      “The way you relate to someone is to make them think ‘They’re just like me, they’re just like my kid, or my little sister, or my best mate,’ ” offers Kapadia. “That’s who she really was. She was just an ordinary kid minding her own business who got famous because she was good at a few things.”

      Yes and no. Winehouse clearly has charisma to burn in the oldest footage we see, whether she’s goofing around with her mates at home, blowing the minds of recording execs at an early audition, or flawlessly improvising a tour of a holiday villa in a thick Spanish accent for best friend Lauren. “It’s one of my favourite bits,” says Kapadia, with a sigh. “I never knew she was funny. She was really funny. You think, ‘Oh God, how did I miss that?’ ”

      Winehouse’s humour is as dissipated as everything else by the time she’s being booed by 20,000 people at a calamitous show in Belgrade, only a month before she’d die of alcohol poisoning. Amy manages to capture the arc of this sad and blighted life while hitting all the important beats. We see the codependent relationships with husband Blake and father Mitch, and the fitful battle with her demons. We’re repeatedly reminded, often through her own words, that Winehouse feared and hated the fame she probably couldn’t avoid.

      “She really wanted it, because she cared, because she loved music. But then, she didn’t want it. She’s a very shy girl who’s a show-off,” suggests Kapadia, who recalls Shymansky’s tale of approaching the young singer for the first time. “She’s like, ‘Not interested, don’t care, don’t trust you,’ ” Kapadia relates. “Weeks later, he gets an envelope and this envelope is covered with her name, covered in stars, covered in kisses. She must have spent three hours just putting that envelope together. I think she’s an amazing contradiction in every way.”

      Most importantly, Amy reminds us that its subject was an amazing talent in every way, and maybe better than most of us realized. Kapadia’s film takes us right back, opening with a recording of Winehouse at 16, attacking “Moon River” with the astounding, if unpolished, chops that would later move Tony Bennett—who also appears on-screen in a remarkably candid recording session with the visibly distressed vocalist—to call her Sarah Vaughan’s equal. The filmmaker says he already understood Winehouse’s genius as a vocalist, but the process of making Amy awakened him to her other monster talents.

      “On a professional level, I didn’t realize her writing was so special,” he says. “I didn’t even think about it. I like it because it’s typically London—she’s not trying to be American—it’s personal, it’s from a woman’s point of view, it’s emotional, it’s humorous…”

      And it gave the filmmaker the key to his subject. In the end, the greatest coup in Amy is its exquisite blend of narrative and music, with Winehouse’s lyrics frequently illustrating, often with blinding accuracy, the story that unfolds. As Kapadia says, everything we ever needed to know about Amy Winehouse was already there, but “we just didn’t pay attention.”

      “The map was right in front of us,” he says. “We had it upside down, didn’t we?”

      Follow Adrian Mack on Twitter @AdrianMacked.

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