Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Thanks to the pace of modern life and the way that everything is captured in its smallest detail for consumption, it was perhaps inevitable that the life and sad demise of Amy Winehouse would one day make its way on to the screens.

In Amy that focus, the character of the blessed and the cursed are played out in equal measure and the contrast between black and white, the humour of the young Jewish woman and the voice that captured many music fan’s hearts bleeds through to the contextualised colour out of control but sharp conviction that plays out across the two hours.

Amy is almost Shakespearian in its tragic form, a modern day Macbeth for whom great things are foretold but for whom the Gods wish to not only destroy utterly, but also make mad one step at a time.

From the first opening shot where she is caught on camera singing happy birthday in a very Marilyn Monroe-President Kennedy type voice to the tragic, perhaps almost inevitable, destruction of a woman who arguably could have given so much to a world of music, A woman whose playful side was perhaps not that well known and her absolute joy in the moments of undisguised adoration when she meets her idol Tony Bennett; the trial of abandoned hope followed her round like a black cloud assassin, picking off brief moments of happiness and replacing them with the unnatural and the all too familiar excesses.

One of the most striking things about the film is in the way that the name is attached to conversations, instead of talking about Amy as if she was an individual, far too often it becomes the plural, the we rather than the she. Whether this is unconsciously done and just happens to find its way worming into the thoughts of the recounting their lives and feelings of the very talented woman is not made clear. However, it is telling that the only person who truly comes out of the whole sorry tale, the film in which the modern expression of truly living in a clear disposable bowl like some sort of circus freak and with the rising tap water slowly threatening to drown all in sight, is the peerless Tony Bennett, whose affection for Amy was for her music and not her life, in such things class always shines through.

Consumption and being consumed, the paparazzi, the hangers-on, the whole sorry affair of a woman who was so lost, so talented with a voice, that even if you couldn’t stand the music she was recording, that cut across like a diamond in many roughs and whose life like far too many now was played out for the media to devour and some within her life to burn up like a rare fossil fuel, this was the message of Amy. There is no hope, just the brief beautiful light in the darkness that was soon snuffed out.

A biopic of the real, the undiluted and neat, the drugs, the abuse, the smile and the voice, a film in which warnings of celebrity are shown and in which purity of spirit is left the moment the realisation of what she can bring for other people is made clear; an outstanding documentary of the highest order.

Ian D. Hall