NEW York, 2007. She's in the booth, recording the final verse of Back to Black. We only said goodbye with words/ I died a hundred times / You go back to her / And I go back to ... blaaack. She waits a bit, then repeats the last word, recalibrating the bar graph of her inflection almost imperceptibly. Deepening the gloom by a few photons. Then a third rendition, with a rusty knife-twist in the middle. Blaa-aack.
She looks down at her feet. Then lifts her gaze to Mark Ronson, the producer. "Ooh, that's quite upsetting, that ending, isn't it?" Then she clowns for him. "Grrrrr! Bom-bom-bom!" Then that lavish, ribald grin.
She seems uncharacteristically in command of herself: laughing at the slowly cooling artefact of her sadness. That's the way creative catharsis should work. You dump your fucked-up heart like a corpse on a crowded pavement, and then you walk away from it. Let them deal with it. Not your problem anymore. It's out there in the song now, not in you. Bring on the royalties, bitches. And when the misery returns, repeat as required.
But Amy Winehouse couldn't master the trick. Her songs couldn't drain away her unhappiness fast enough. There weren't enough songs, and there wasn't enough time.
Asif Kapadia's documentary about the singer, Amy, which screens in South Africa at the European Film Festival next month, is a supremely attentive study of addiction and the cruelties of fame. Kapadia shuns gratuitous judgment and cheap sentimentality. The film consists almost entirely of public and private video clips of her life, with no editorialising or talking-head interviews. The only new footage is a thread of slow aerial pans over London and New York cityscapes, an analogue for the urbane grandeur of her spirit.
Much of the previously unseen footage was supplied to Kapadia by people who were close to Amy, including those who aided and abetted her decline into abjection: her opportunistic, foolish father Mitchell, her insufferable paramour Blake Fielder-Civil, her exploitative manager Raye Cosbert. Kapadia lets us find them guilty or innocent; he says nothing.
All the while, some other suspects shuffle into the dock alongside her intimate enablers: you and me. Our prurient gaze is the bloodied weapon. Kapadia is repulsed by the sadism of post-millennial celebrity culture - a pathology that emerged in parallel with Amy's career.
If we read and talk and laugh about unravelling stars, then we're at the rearguard of a lynch mob propelled and financed by our clicks and views and shares. Some of the bleakest scenes in the film show Amy stumbling, horrified, into a limelit hell of paparazzi flashes. In one sequence, she arrives at a prison to visit Fielder-Civil, who has been jailed for defeating the ends of justice. She's a corporeal ghost, unmoored and barely conscious, and you can sense a shudder of self-loathing in the assembled pack of reporters. But they're still there, still shooting, still asking stupid questions.
By documenting the hunting of Amy, even in good faith, does Kapadia nonetheless join that hunt, after the fact? And do we not also - by consuming the spectacle yet again, wearing the thin camouflage of remembrance?
The long arc of Amy's descent is leavened with some hilarious interview clips in which she savages the idiocies of the commercial music machine. In a 2003 interview on a Dutch radio show, she disses a producer who added some fake strings to Take the Box without her consent. "I would never have done that, ever, ever." The interviewer, his journalistic wits dulled by the studied blandness of most starlets in publicity interviews, has no clue how to respond, scrambling for his next question.
She helps him out. "Sorry, I went really bitter there, I went really upset. Because I hate that guy who did that."
The Dutchman is still befuddled. "Oh. Oh. OK. OK."
Another lame interviewer likens her emotional lyrics to those of Dido, the bloodless, mawkish chart-topper of the time. Amy reacts by fiddling scornfully with her lip stud, her face doing all the talking with a fusillade of eye-rolls and sneers.
Jonathan Ross was more of a match for her. When she appeared on his show, he asked whether her industry handlers had tried to mould her into something she wasn't. "Yeah," she said, quick as a flash, "one of them tried to mould me into a big triangle shape, but I went 'Nooo!'"
That night, that year, was Amy's apex. She was 21. Gloriously voluptuous, clear-eyed, whip-smart, sceptical, provisionally accepting the adulation. The emotional carnage of her lyrics still seemed to be a posture, an aesthetic instinct awaiting practical application. Of course she was far from undamaged, and she knew it: she had been clinically depressed as an adolescent, and was well versed in the arts of promiscuity and betrayal. In What is it About Men? off her debut album, Frank, she attributes her sexual misdeeds to Mitchell's adultery and his exit from the home when she was 11:
Understand, once he was a family man
So surely I would never, ever go through it first-hand
Emulate all the shit my mother hates
I can't help but demonstrate my Freudian fate
My alibi for taking your guy
History repeats itself, it fails to die
And animal aggression is my downfall
I don't care about what you got, I want it all
It's bricked up in my head, it's shoved under my bed
And I question myself again 'What is it 'bout men?'
My destructive side has grown a mile wide
And I question myself again 'What is it 'bout men?
'What is it 'bout men?'
But it took one man, Fielding-Civil, to pull her deep into the black. At moments in the film, he elicits a bit of sympathy: he's a sad, self-harming man-whore, the son of a broken home, assuaging his insecurities by "keeping his dick wet", as she tautly puts it in Back to Black. A sleazy Antony to her trashy Cleopatra.
As the story unspools, though, he becomes a prat in a hat - and a villainous one at that. First he leaves Amy for his "old safe bet". Then he goes back to her when the triumph of Back to Black makes her rich enough to bankroll globe-trotting debauchery. Then he introduces her to crack and heroin. And finally, he leaves her again when he's finally clean - and she is still in mortal danger.
Apparently unburdened by talent or wit or generosity, Fielding-Civil seems ludicrously inferior to her. Why on earth would the writer of Stronger than Me - a dry complaint about the neediness of another beta male ("Feel like a lady, and you my ladyboy") - accept this asymmetry, and even crave it? It's a mystery. Somehow she mistook Fielding-Civil's treachery for strength, and his hedonism for courage.
Her near-unshakeable faith in her dad is just as mystifying. Mitchell famously let her dodge a rehab programme for alcohol abuse when it might have worked, well before the crisis of fame. And later, together with her manager Cosbert, he proceeded to bully her into touring when she was deep in an addiction crisis, and exploited her success to make his own reality show about being her dad. At one point, he rocks up with a cameraman in tow, to disrupt her fragile recovery on a Caribbean island.
Let's leave speculation about an Electra complex to the shrinks. But Mitchell's authority over Amy may have partly been secured by her awareness of a priceless intangible inheritance: his musical sensibility. He was a taxi driver by trade, but as a kid she teleported into the distant galaxy of mid-century jazz by playing his records and falling for his idols: Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holliday, Dinah Washington.
The lurid sadness of Amy's life and death can obscure her musical importance as the reinventor of that monumental tradition. Amy was a bona fide genius, who exceeded most of the great jazz vocalists by writing her own songs - and by expanding and dirtying the canon with infusions of hip-hop, reggae and indie rock.
Anthony Lane, writing in the New Yorker, has pointed out that the film doesn't do as much as it could have done to honour Amy's extraordinary musical force and craft. The early club shows are presented in enticing shards, leaving you jonesing for the whole performance.
As with any great songwriter, the full brilliance of Amy's lyrics - which are consistently lucid, uncluttered, funny and brutal - doesn't quite transmit on the page. The rhymes and conceits are like windows and walls, and her voice is the "five-storey fire". Even so, verses like these blaze even on paper ...
Though I battled blind
Love is a fate resigned
Memories mar my mind
Love is a fate resigned
Over futile odds
And laughed at by the gods
And now the final frame
Love is a losing game
mini_story_image_vleft3
One of the tenderest observers of Amy's life is Yasiin Bey, aka Mos Def, who met her in 2004. "She didn't have any airs. She was real. We hit it off and became fast friends. She was just a charmer. Sweet lady. I had a bit of a crush on her, to be honest. She was raw ... fast with a blue joke. Could drink anybody under the table. Wasn't afraid to roll a smoke. Had a big, giant laugh. She was just a sweetheart, you know."
Five years later in a Miami hotel, he saw the shadow to that radiant decadence. She had just swept the Grammys. "Very late at night she knocks on the door. Comes in and just sits on the couch. I remember feeling very happy for her, and very concerned. She really didn't know how to be that thing she had been pushed to become. Then she pulled out this aluminium foil. She said, 'Does this bother you?'
"I said, 'Amy, I love you. I don't mind that you get high. But I mind that you get high.' And I was like: this is someone who is trying to disappear."
Bey's dilemma is familiar to every functioning user who is close to a dysfunctional user. Who was he to judge a friend and artist for escaping a labyrinth?
The conventional psychiatric wisdom is that creativity has no direct link to substance abuse: instead, a genetic deficiency drives both behaviours.
People born with a low-functioning dopamine system are more likely to be compulsive seekers of novelty and risk. They need more intense experiences to compensate for their shortage of pleasure in ordinary experience. The dopamine-deprived are therefore more likely to be both creative and addicted. But the addiction doesn't support their creativity - it harms it. That's the theory.
But it all seems a bit messier than that. Some great artists somehow stay happily and productively addicted for decades - by picking the right drug, and by striking a fine balance between self-control and self-medication. Some other great artists find a sober voice that is just as inspired as the addicted voice.
It's hard to imagine Amy taking either of those roads. And it's probably too easy to blame her demise on those close to her, and on the fame culture that consumed her. Hindsight is infinitely sharper than foresight.
But she deserved better treatment, in every sense of the word. And if she had lived a long life and never recorded another song, we would have had no cause for complaint.
'Amy' will be screened at the European Film Festival at Cinema Nouveau in Joburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban, from May 8 to 16 2016. For dates and bookings, go to eurofilmfest.co.za, cinemanouveau.co.za, sterkinekor.com, or call 0861-668-437...