“Back to Black” is an excellent biopic about Amy Winehouse. It tells the story of one of the best soul and jazz singers of her time – and a fatal love.
After about 40 minutes comes the scene that gives Amy Winehouse’s life the decisive direction into the abyss. It’s so dense and intense that you feel like the woman sitting up there on screen in a bar is about to climb down and sit next to you to finish what is probably her 37th cigarette of the day. She orders a drink, and together we look at this “bloke”, as the English call the primitive version of a man, who has just come through the door and is checking out what there is to pick here. Beer or woman or both.
London, Camden district, 2005, in what was then the music pub “The Good Mixer”, cave-like light, smokey, patina, music box on the wall, pool tables. One look at the woman in the cinema seat and a whispered warning that the guy’s name is Blake, and stay away, it’s going to go wrong, you already know it. But the woman reacts with a sharp, narrow-eyed look and replies that she can probably decide that herself. She gets up, climbs back up into the bar of that movie “Back to Black” and smiles at Blake.
Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder Civil. One of the best soul and jazz singers of her time and a good-for-nothing who does something with videos for a living and is a drug addict. That couldn’t and shouldn’t go well. At the time of the scene described, Amy Winehouse, this graceful and self-confident woman with this legendary soul voice and musical esprit down to her little finger, only has six years of life left in front of her.
British actress Marisa Abela shines as Amy Winehouse. She is the age the real singer died: 27
© Studiocanal / Dean Rogers
It’s a kind of fatal accident that you watch in slow motion. The crash and the path leading up to it can be dissected very thoroughly and in great detail in such a way that the rescue attempts that took place in Amy Winehouse’s life also become visible.
She tried to separate, tried withdrawal, and she had a father who wanted to protect her, everything was there. But she didn’t manage to throw Blake out of her life, and so she ended up in 2011 at the age of 27, alone in her apartment with more than four per mille of alcohol in her blood.
Amy Winehouse had a voice like no other
What makes “Back to Black” worth watching is that it doesn’t tell the simple story of a great musical talent who accidentally fell in love with an idiot who dragged him into the abyss. Rather, the film shows that life and fate are never that easy and follow complicated paths. We follow a woman who is very complex even at a young age. The daughter from a musical Jewish family with divorced parents who, thanks to her jazz-loving father, buried herself in her room at the age of 17 or 18 with old music by Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald during the fading Brit-pop boom. What she wanted to sing shouldn’t just come from her mouth, but from much further down.
Amy Winehouse had found an approach within herself that artists rarely find in music. Almost as if this young woman had not sought and found the soul, the rhythm and the feeling for every single note, but the other way around, namely that this music with its depth and unconditionality had chosen this Amy Winehouse as her body instrument.
Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in “Back to Black”
That may sound adventurous, but anyone who remembers the Winehouse years still has these images in their head. That of a girl who transformed herself into a woman, got new tattoos almost every month, piled her hair up in increasingly daring ’60s beehive hairstyles, and masked herself with thick, black eyeliner. The story of a woman who became increasingly drunk and unpredictable as she became more famous. A musical being who also wanted to be a woman in real life, wanted to love, wanted to be happy and failed because of herself in every attempt to combine the two. And instead settled between drugs and alcohol, as if there was no other option. “They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no,” she sang defiantly, “they tried to put me in rehab, but I said no, no, no.” A song that became one of their biggest hits.
The tragedy of Amy Winehouse was often told after her death. Her father Mitch wrote a book, there were a few documentaries, such as “Amy” from 2015. “Back to Black” is a fictionalized biography by the director and artist Sam Taylor-Johnson, who already appeared in “Nowhere Boy” in 2009. dealt with John Lennon’s relationship with his strict mother. The cast is remarkable. Without Marisa Abela as Amy, without Jack O’Connell as Blake and Eddie Marsan as Papa Mitch, “Back to Black” would probably have been just a decent film.
A life of intoxication
But with this ensemble, which not only plays the roles but fills them, something like a tangible return to that time has been achieved when you can smell the smoke of cigarettes and the liquory breath in rumpled beds in the morning. Or watch Amy’s disintegration when her hair tower eventually becomes a ruin, the tattoos are first proof of love, but later only images of her desperation and pain.
There is only one thing that cannot be achieved even with the best camera work and direction: drug addiction can be translated into images, but not into comprehensible feelings. You can show the coke lines, the vodka bottles, the heroin syringes and the morning sips from the liquor bottle. But not feeling the relief and release after the dose. At least not if you don’t know it yourself.
Hope only arises in this downward spiral when Marisa Abela herself sings “Back to Black” or “Love Is a Losing Game” on stage and enlivens this Winehouse sound in a disturbingly authentic way. It swings through the cinema as if nothing had happened, and you watch her like a drowning person, repeatedly emerging from the abyss with her songs to take a breath.
But back in 2005 at the counter of the Good Mixer, she forgot how to swim.