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'Ravishing': Amy Winehouse.
‘Ravishing’: Amy Winehouse. Photograph: James McCauley/REX Shutterstock
‘Ravishing’: Amy Winehouse. Photograph: James McCauley/REX Shutterstock

Why we’re so confused about Amy Winehouse

This article is more than 8 years old
A new movie about the singer has provoked hugely divergent reactions

There’s an unfashionable bar I drink in on the edge of Soho – you can always find a table – and what makes it unfashionable isn’t so much the neon lighting, the scant bowls of crisps or the pink straws in the gin and tonic so much as the Amy Winehouse fan art covering the walls. Amy’s five-day-old mussed-up beehive, smudged Cleopatra eyeliner and shy-bold eyes, features as unmistakable as Marilyn’s platinum curls, heavy eyelashes and delighted red-lipped smile, multiply around you in photorealist or more impressionistic oils.

Winehouse, who died four years ago this month, is already a too classical and universal part of pop culture to be fashionable. But we still can’t decide on what we witnessed during her last three years. Asif Kapadia’s new found-footage documentary of her life, Amy, was met with astonishment when it premiered at Cannes and was reviewed on its release on Friday as both “mawkish tabloid fare” and “a tragic masterpiece”. Was she a decent jazz singer made glorious by notoriety or a real musician unfairly cut down in her prime?

Some of the reaction may simply be down to Kapadia’s method. As in his film about Ayrton Senna, the movie is assembled from home videos, accidentally captured performance footage and previously released photos and interviews. Amy is narrated primarily using Winehouse’s voice but also the voices of people close to her. The overall effect is memory-like: as during the hazy morning after an indulgent night before, your mind does half the work for you, filtering out the long walk home, the price of the drinks and the number of games of pool played, leaving you with the sky-blue eyes of the boy you kissed.

But the film undercuts those beautiful dramatic moments with the banal ones: Winehouse in a taxi, flirting with her manager to pass the time; 14-year-old Winehouse and her friends sucking lollipops and talking earnestly about nothing in that way native to teenagers; Winehouse waiting for her Grammy to be announced, curling her lip at the cheesy title of the Justin Timberlake record she’s up against. No one can tell you exactly what happened to Amy; every third word in the movie is her name and the chorus gets louder as the paparazzi close in.

The facts aren’t in dispute: eerily talented north London girl brought low by drink and drugs. But what – or how much – did it mean? Were we witnessing female genius – and of what kind? – or mainly a rare talent for mimicry and phrasing? And what did we, Amy’s public, do to her? Though steeped in Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan, she wasn’t known for her first album, Frank, where you can hear their influence, but for her second, Back to Black.

By then Winehouse was listening to the Shangri-Las’ I Can Never Go Home Anymore and turning her own lost love into oddly buoyant song. She couldn’t write about something unless she’d lived it, she says in Kapadia’s film, but she notices that she always added a punchline. She knows what it’s like to be hit and for it to feel like a kiss, but when the bruises faded, she can laugh at and admonish herself.

From the start, Winehouse had a voice that sounded as if she had already lived through it all, and she then also chose to write about what was happening to her, and we could tell. On Back to Black, she dies 100 times; to Rolling Stone, she says of her boyfriend going back to his ex: “I wanted to die.” There was an authenticity to the way Winehouse was – in spite of the Motown pastiche, perhaps because of it – that you hoped wasn’t quite as genuinely reckless as it seemed.

We couldn’t tell when she was falling apart for real, but we believed, or just assumed, that it wasn’t so bad that it would mean no more songs for us. That’s how artists work, isn’t it? The reviewers of Amy agree that she was ravishing: she “always looked as if she was writing the song on the spot”; she was “an entire brass section, melted down and poured into one small frame”, but now that her death seems to have confirmed what we thought we saw, they’re not sure if we should be looking.

In discussing Montage of Heck, the Kurt Cobain documentary that came out earlier this year, reviewers didn’t question their permission to stare at the wreckage in quite the same way. Part of this is that we look differently at women who seem both unapologetic and vulnerable. But it may also simply be that more time has passed since Cobain died, that his family was happier than Winehouse’s seems to be with the resulting film and that he existed before paparazzi proper, before phone-hacking, before The X Factor.

Cobain’s lyrics for Nirvana were mysterious and beautiful and entirely evocative of the time but they couldn’t appear, as Winehouse’s did, on a Cambridge practical criticism examination, alongside a poem by Walter Raleigh. “I’m an anachronism,” she said, meaning her jazz upbringing, her preference for writing her own songs and for live instrumentation, but, when she’s placed alongside a 16th-century poet, you also see her use of extended metaphor, her coinage of a word such as “fuckery” – the wit of a John Donne in a Betty Boop body.

How does the anachronism fare today? In 2007 and 2008, when Winehouse was unavoidable, I didn’t see the appeal. Her rebellion seemed of a useless sort. It was before the financial crash and I was in my mid-20s, a good girl focused on doing well at work. But Amy was born just a year later than me, just a few miles away, and in Kapadia’s film I saw the disposable pop landscape of our youth made timeless – the Lolita-ish lollipops, the silk handkerchief tops, the doomed love for Camden, the exhilarating ladette gobbiness, the Jack Daniel’s and Coke – all so cheery and all so sad.

I put on Back to Black, let Amy’s voice drift out into the summer air and allow myself not to decide whether it was a tragedy or not.

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