Even as the young Winehouse sings one of the world's most familiar songs, she turns it into a wacky little gift with a fat, tremulous bow on top she's a kitchen-sink diva just waiting for the world to discover her. When she opens her mouth, what comes out is the sound of the future as informed by the past: This was a young North London girl infatuated with singers such as Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington and Tony Bennett, as well as by instrumentalists like Thelonious Monk.
The result is a surprisingly seamless biographical documentary, one that, even though it's been constructed largely from found elements, feels gracefully whole.Īmy opens with home-video footage shot during a birthday celebration for Gilbert: The group begins to sing “Happy Birthday,” and the camera swings toward Winehouse, at the time a young teenager. Kapadia has conducted interviews with key people in Winehouse's life - including her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, and her longtime best girlfriends, Juliette Ashby and Lauren Gilbert - weaving them through performance and interview footage as well as personal videos and stills shot by friends, family and colleagues. To hear Winehouse sing numbers such as “Back to Black” and “Love Is a Losing Game” in Asif Kapadia's sensitive and extraordinary documentary Amy is to open yourself to an unsettling rush of grief and joy. Once an artist is lost to us, the music he or she has left behind somehow changes color and tone, often becoming more beautiful rather than less - maybe because what we're hearing is a beginning with an ending already written into it.
When a musician or singer we love dies, we mourn with our ears. The death of Amy Winehouse at age 27, in July 2011, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event - like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th - that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility of human lives and the half-comforting, half-haunting permanence of recorded music.
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