Like Senna’s, Winehouse’s family co-operated with Kapadia, but unlike them, they are displeased with the film, and it’s not hard to see why. As well as a welcome portrait of the frequently caricatured Winehouse as an (exceptional) artist and as a person, Amy is an indictment of those around her, especially her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, with whom she developed a set of addictions that derailed her life, her manager, Raye Cosbert, and her father, Mitch, all of whom are portrayed as prioritising her career (and thus theirs) over her health.
If Winehouse seems a rare figure here in being neither hero nor villain, that’s some redress for being rhetorically robbed of her personhood so often while she was alive. Kapadia claims a producer asked him: ‘Why would you want to make a film about a junkie?’ And for anyone who has forgotten, he resurrects TV footage in which Graham Norton brings up her troubles to uproarious laughter from the crowd, who seem primed for schadenfreude at the mere mention of her name.
—Lidija Haas writing in the London Review of Books about Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy, about the singer Amy Winehouse.
from Longreads Blog » Longreads Blog http://blog.longreads.com/2015/07/27/the-amy-winehouse-documentary-doesnt-pander/
No comments:
Post a Comment