Amy Winehouse is her music: Why Asif Kapadia's documentary on the singer is 2015's best

He is a Gujarati British Indian whose non-fictional film Senna, on Brazilian motor-racer Ayrton Senna was the highest-grossing documentary in the UK, until 2015, when Asif broke his own record with his documentary on singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, whose name proved ominously prophetic as she drank herself to death at age 27. But it’s not cheap irony that Asif’s amazing documentary Amy, seeks from a life snuffed out so tersely, as though the Gods frowned on one so young being. The first thought you have upon watching the docu is that Elton John’g song Candle In The Wind, written for the tragic casualty of Marilyn Monroe, has found a better more contemporary candidate. [caption id=“attachment_2334398” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The poster of Asif Kapadia’s Amy.[/caption] Amy shocks regales and exhilarates all at once because, honestly, Asif Kapadia isn’t aiming to anoint Amy as the fallen hero, the female Dean or the British Monroe, if you will. What the solidly constructed documentary does with just real-life casually-shot home-video type footage is to profile a life that embodies all the cliches of stardom and while doing so, providentially escapes being a cliché . To begin with Amy (whose music or persona never touched my life the way this Asif’s documentary does) is/was not an archetypal showbiz type. She looks different and has an accessible personality that we constantly hear journalists and friends comment about in the documentary. Amy is/was her music. She re-interpreted the improvisational paces of jazz and soul music in her way, imbibed into them the spirit of throbbing originality, so in way she improvised on a form of music that was already passed convention and hence enormously improvisational. Asif Kapadia takes Amy’s music and uses it to connect us to her world. That’s not easy to do since Amy, as we see and hear her , lives in a space of her own unoccupied by any before or after. We get to hear a lot of what Amy’s father Mitch (who comes across as a bit of a self-serving jerk) and friends, specially childhood friend Juliette Ashby, have to say about Amy’s rapid descent into drugs and drinks. Finally Amy stopped drinking because she stopped breathing. In the documentary we see the insensitivity and cruelty of Amy’s fans and the paparazzi as they hound her to death; literally. Amy’s final concert in Belgrade caught in Kapadia’s film, is chilling. There, in the middle of a gig, she suddenly stopped singing. Amy Winehouse gave up. Asif Kapadia enters her dark disturbed and disturbing world with guarded gusto, invading but never violating her fragile persona as it comes apart peg by peg, snort by snort. In an interview some years ago Asif Kapadia had said, “I was born and have lived all my life in London. I was born and brought up in Hackney, North London. I never really watched films when I was young. I preferred to play football. I became interested when I worked on a short film at the age of 18. I loved the experience of being on location with a crew. I went on to work as assistant director, assistant editor, sound recordist, a bit of everything. Then I began making short films on the side with friends. I went on to study filmmaking at the University of Westminster and the Royal College of Art. I have a European style to my filmmaking and my background is Indian. I happen to love making films and I use the different strands of my identity in my work. I am a filmmaker and am proud to be a Londoner. That’s where I feel at home.” Wherever he may feel at home, we are proud of Asif Kapdia. For my money and time he is the best filmmaker of Indian origin making films from abroad. Amy has immortalized the young musician in a way that very few films do. Because at the end of the day, fictional filmmaking can only be about selective truth. And that is a tone that wouldn’t have worked for a life as scrupulously unpretentious as Amy Winehouse’s.