52 Films by Women Vol 8. 14. Back to Black (Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson)
There isn’t a word
called ‘bioxploitation’ but maybe there should be to refer to films like Back to Black. These are movies that get punters through
the door by virtue of their subject, famous pop stars what died too young, that
get greenlit to reignite interest in their subject’s back catalogue, maybe make
the surviving family a few quid and that. The subject in question is London-born
and bred (oy, oy) singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, who had two hit albums, won
five Grammys, and died in her pink-walled, half-decorated home in 2011, aged
27. We should be moved – I packed extra tissues – but there wasn’t a wet eye in
the house.
Like many people of
a certain age, I lived through Winehouse’s decline and fall in real time. She
was the subject of numerous newspaper headlines, tottering incoherently towards
the gutter. Her unhappiness was evident, but what was the cause? The film, written
by Matt Greenhalgh and directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, the pair collaborating
for the first time since Taylor-Johnson’s feature debut, Nowhere Boy, about another pop legend, John Lennon, provides
an answer. She loved her Blake (bless) – that’s Blake Fielder-Civil, her
ex-husband. She couldn’t get pregnant. But there’s so much more that the film
doesn’t say.
The Amy of the film,
ably portrayed by Marisa Abela, who bravely does her own singing – Winehouse
had a distinctive deep jazz singer voice which you imitate at your peril, as
any frequenters of Karaoke bars will tell you – is self-possessed but not
driven. We hear her express her admiration for singers of the 1960s, describing
her singer nan, Cynthia Levy (Lesley Manville, classing the joint) as ‘my style
icon’ (an expression that I didn’t hear much in the noughties, and I thought I
read a lot) even as she sits on the top of Parliament Hill, offering Amy a tuna
bagel. Amy came from a singer family. Her taxi-driver dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan)
could hold a tune. He could also hold a pint. Three generations under the
spotlight; what made Amy different, though, was that she wrote her own stuff.
Taylor-Johnson
stages a moment of maximum cringe in which Amy retreats to her room and composes
a song in three minutes flat, the length of time it takes to sing it. As any
creative soul will shout, it doesn’t work like that. Amy describes herself as
living her trauma through music, but there’s spite there too. One of the first
songs we hear is critical of her current boyfriend, Chris Taylor (Ryan
O’Doherty), who throws his gin bottle out of the pram. ‘Almost gay?’ he fumes, referring
to an offending lyric before legging it out the pub with middle-class
indignation. Amy is glad to see the back thereof but is somewhat contradictory.
‘I’m not a feminist. I like men too much,’ she says, in a moment of trite
amusement.
What is missing from
the film entirely is any sense of Amy’s ambition. Artists choose the spotlight.
An ego is involved. So what did Amy want to achieve? ‘I don’t care about the
money,’ she says more than once, a line that rings hollow. If your nan is
offering you bagels on Parliament Hill Fields instead of tea at the Carlyle,
then you care about money. You care about thermals and all. When Cynthia tells
her, ‘I got lung cancer,’ after refusing a cigarette, Amy is distraught.
Amy comes from a
broken home. Her mum and dad live separate lives. Early on, Mitch rues that
Amy’s brother, Alex (Izaak Cainer) doesn’t ring him. We don’t know how Amy and
her brother interact because you can opt out of a biopic if you’re still alive
and not a figure of public interest, which makes a mockery of the whole
enterprise. Amy’s mother barely features either; one suspects the same
condition applies. With these prohibitions in place, why embark on a film that
claims to illuminate its subject? Because the film makes no such assertion.
Which brings us to
Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), very much a figure of public interest.
O’Connell enters the film with the swagger of Robert de Niro as Johnny Boy in
Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. Blake is flush with £160 worth of winnings
on the proverbial horse that came in. He encounters Amy at the bar, seemingly
oblivious to her fame, absorbed instead in the fruits of his good fortune. Amy
is impressed, not just because he buys her a drink that contains at least four
brands of alcohol – three brands too many in my opinion – but that he wants
nothing from her. Someone with that level of self-possession – an ease of
living within one’s own skin – must be worth getting to know, right? Even
though he describes himself as ‘sofa surfing’, another anachronism. However,
when they play pool – UK rules, always – he sings along to her tune. He knows
the dish if not the recipe.
Those who followed
the Amy-Blake relationship as reported in the press were given the impression
that Blake exploited Amy. The film offers a different take. Amy is enraptured
by Blake’s modest pretentions. ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m a video production
assistant.’ ‘You make the tea.’ ‘No, I don’t make the tea. I make the best
tea.’ ‘You should come down to mine – make me a cup.’ Neither party is
particularly subtle. The film portrays Amy as the exploiter, stealing Blake
from his girlfriend, Becky (Thereca Wilson-Read), snogging him on their second
encounter right in front of her. I’m not sure Amy included that in a song
lyric. Blake turns up in Amy’s house in the rain. ‘About that cup of tea?’ The
singer would rather spoon.
Still courtesy of Studio Canal (UK)
The course of true
love puts you right out, so the saying goes. Amy and Blake go on a date to the
London Zoo. ‘I want to see the chinchillas,’ Blake insists, in love with the
word if not the creature. She calls her nan to introduce Blake by phone. ‘All
right, nan?’ Blake cocks presumptuously. Nan is unwell, as a montage concluding
with her white coffin clearly illustrates.
Meanwhile in her musical
career – that old thing – Amy dumps 19 Management – ‘I ain’t no Spice Girl’ as
she announces twice. If she was, she’d be Tattoo Spice, getting a souvenir for
all of the people and things that mean something in her life. She and Blake
have a joint inking session, Amy getting Blake’s name tattooed close to her
heart. Blake gets Amy’s name tattooed somewhere more discreet. Amy is put out. The
record company won’t push Amy’s debut album, ‘Frank’, in America. ‘You only get
one shot at the States,’ she is told. She is also advised to ditch her guitar.
‘People want to see you sing.’ Amy agrees to this suggestion.
Still courtesy of Studio Canal (UK)
More than an hour
passes before we see Amy in a beehive – well, she never does beehive. (Tish!)
During one of her gigs, Blake nips out. All that chatting on stage – what’s
that about? It is almost as if Amy uses the audience as her therapist, only the
audience are the ones paying – and no sofa either. Amy explodes at him. Someone
asks for a selfie. There’s barging. Amy’s violent side erupts.
‘I once saw four
cubs in here,’ Amy tells Blake outside the lion’s den as the male lion beelines
for the female. ‘Were they too pride to beg?’ you want Blake to ask. He
introduces her to the 1960s girl group, the Shangri-La’s, in particular ‘The
Leader of the Pack’, though Blake doesn’t have a gang, rather one bloke, who
after Blake and Amy break up, advises him to go for her money. ‘You can pay
your debt to me. Then I can pay the bloke I owe,’ he adds. Cut to the reunion.
Though Sam
Taylor-Johnson directed Fifty
Shades of Grey, she dials down
the sex here. In the film’s only nude scene Amy and Blake skinny-dip in a
swimming pool. Amy arches her body into a crescent shape, even as her
relationship heads towards a cul de sac.
The couple marry in
secret in Miami, away from the media scrum. After her wedding meal of
hamburgers, served for some reason under a metal cloche, she phones her dad,
who steps out of the pub into the street, puts his head in his hand and
exclaims, ‘bloody hell, Amy’. ‘Hello pop,’ Blake adds, cheerfully.
Blake has a drug
addiction. It isn’t long in their general coupling that Amy partakes.
Eventually, Blake is arrested after assaulting a publican. We don’t see the incident,
but the police burst into Amy’s flat and nab him. ‘May I put some clothes on?’
he asks. We half-want the copper to refuse.
Taylor-Johnson
restages the concert in which the audience boo Blake’s name when Amy tells them
he’s getting out of prison. ‘Who booed? I’ll come after you,’ Amy cries before
repeating the statement to get her audience to cheer. She leaves the main stage
to totter around in high-heels, back and forth as if trying to escape security.
Any minute now she’ll fall over. We barely pay attention to the tune or the
lyrics. Later Mitch discovers Amy in her house having banged her head. Things
cannot go on as before. During a prison visit, Blake announces he wants a
divorce. ‘I’m almost clean except for the weed,’ he explains. He describes
himself as having lived in a toxic co-dependent relationship, which is a bit of
a mouthful coming from him. Simply put, Blake and Amy are bad for each other.
It’s enough to send Amy to the off-licence. In one scene, she is recognised by
a young girl, who asks for her autograph. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Abby.’ ‘That’s
like my name only with B’s instead of M,’ Amy explains. You want Shakespeare, cinemagoers,
head for Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Eventually, having
made herself famous with a song about refusing Rehab, Amy gets cleaned up. She
swigs water now instead of wine, but as the film puts it, after her Grammy
success, news of Blake’s new relationship and his baby cause her to climb the
stairs in her house to be replaced by a series of captions.
Was there any hope
for Amy? In the film, everyone wants what’s best for her, whether seeking
professional help, breaking up with her, or giving her a necklace. In other
words, this is another biopic in which there are no villains save for Amy’s
demons. Taylor-Johnson’s style of exposition is 50% tell don’t show, as in
describing her talent as a child. What we aren’t told – or shown – is what lies
behind her attitude to men. My guess is that she may have blamed her mother for
her parents’ divorce. She might be a woman who believes that ‘you have to hang
on to a man by giving them what they want’. Amy doesn’t like needy men, but the
film articulates this as anti-middle class. In the end, she resorts to a
reproduction jukebox, sex, and alcohol for pleasure. Her working-class roots
don’t sufficiently fortify her. Her demise is banal. Taylor-Johnson positions
Amy’s tragic end as a cautionary tale not of the dangers of addictive behaviour
rather of refusing a set of class values commensurate with her income. Diana Dors
and Joan Collins should have been her style icons.
Reviewed at Cineworld Dover, Kent, Southern England, Saturday 13 April 2024, 19:50 screening
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