Asif Kapadia – Memphis Flyer

There’s a strange contradiction in the hearts of performers. On the one hand, being the center of attention of a large group of people (“public speaking”) regularly tops surveys of people’s biggest fears. On the other hand, being the center of attention of a large group of people is the ultimate goal of any performer. If you want to get rich — or even make a living — as a musician, you’re going to have to be able to thrive in conditions that the vast majority of people would call hell.

That’s the big takeaway from Amy, the new documentary on the rise and fall of Amy Winehouse directed by Asif Kapadia. This is the director’s second documentary after 2010’s excellent Senna. But while the story of Formula One racing legend Ayrton Senna was mostly triumph, Winehouse’s story is a slow-motion tragedy that makes for a much more complex and challenging film.

As in Senna, Kapadia uses all archival footage stitched together with a keen editing eye. There are no talking heads — the few contemporary interviews are all presented as voice-only under relevant footage. We first meet Winehouse in 1998 at age 14 singing “Happy Birthday” with her friends Lauren Gilbert and Juliette Ashby. Her prodigious talent is already evident, even though she’s just a fresh-faced “North London Jewish girl,” as Island Records president Nick Gatfield calls her. Even then, she was a woman out of time. As Britpop and hip-hop dominated the London airwaves and the beginnings of dubstep seeped through the underground, Winehouse was idolizing Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett. Her first producer Salaam Remi puts it, “She had the styling of a 70-year-old jazz singer.”

There’s no shortage of images of Winehouse as a dead-eyed junkie, but Kapadia is able to show her humanity, because he won the trust of her first manager Nick Shymansky, who happened to obsessively chronicle her early tours with a handheld digital camera. Of all the people in her orbit, Shymansky comes off the best. He apparently had a bit of an unrequited crush on Winehouse, but even after she fired him in a fit of pique, he still had her best interests at heart. That is not true about literally anyone else she surrounded herself with after her 2003 album Frank became an unlikely hit in England. She started hanging out at London’s trendy Trash nightclub, where she met her husband Blake Fielder-Civil. If you’ve ever known a pair of mutually reinforcing junkies, you already know what their relationship was like. Booze, pot, coke, crack, meth, heroin — you name it, they took it. Fielder-Civil was also a musician, but when Winehouse became the biggest star in the world in the mid-2000s, he became a professional enabler.

Not that Winehouse needed much enabling. The film depicts her as never recovering from her parents’ divorce at the age of 9. She was severely depressed as a teenager and a bulimic from age 15 until she died at 27. She wrote the songs that propelled her to stardom as a way to deal with her many issues, but it was one song in particular that seemed to have doomed her. “Rehab” was written about a failed intervention Shymansky, Gilbert, and Ashby staged for her, which was squelched by her increasingly careerist father. It was kind of an afterthought on the carefully crafted Back To Black album, but when it became her biggest hit, it took on the air of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Amy functions a companion piece to Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. The two self-destructive musical prodigies had similar trajectories, but they were treated differently by the press and public. Cobain’s junk-induced suicide was an unexpected tragedy, while the world was practically taking bets on how long it would take Winehouse’s body to give out under the onslaught of a $16,000-a-week polysubstance habit. Amy does not hesitate to point the finger at the gawkers and paparazzi who fed them, even as Kapadia depends on their copious footage to fill out the overly long end of his film. Amy succeeds at humanizing Winehouse but leaves you feeling queasy at your own eagerness to watch the trainwreck.

Do you have one of those movies that has been sitting in your Netflix queue forever? You don’t remember how it got there, or why you wanted to watch it in the first place, but either you never bothered to delete it or you checked the info periodically and said, “Oh yeah. That’s got so-and-so in it.” Or “Uncle Jack thought we would like that,” or something similar. Well, I have several dozen of those movies on my Netflix queue. Maybe it’s a form of digital hoarding, but I wouldn’t know, since none of my long-term queue sitters is a psychologically manipulative reality show like Hoarders.

For me, one such hoarded movie was the 2010 documentary Senna. I don’t know how I heard of it or how it got into my queue, but I do know it had been there for a long time. Way before that time I got obsessed with Universal and Hammer horror movies and littered my list with The Mummy Returns, Black Sabbath, and The Invisible Ray, Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna had been staring at me with his steely eyes as I flipped by him on my way to my complete rewatch of all seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. (It still holds up, by the way). Maybe it was supposed to be part of my research into the Antenna documentary, but once that was over, I never wanted to watch another documentary in my life. But recently, once my filmmaker’s PTSD had abated a little bit, I finally decided to watch Senna. I wish I hadn’t waited so long, because it is brilliant.

Director Asif Kapadia chose to make the film without any talking head interviews, narration, or recreations. Instead, the story is told through vintage footage of Senna’s races and contemporary interviews with the driver, his family, and his rivals. There are a few interviews that were obviously done for the film, but they are only voice overs. Everything on the screen dates from either Senna’s childhood or his time on the track from 1984 until his death behind the wheel a decade later. Kapadia is able to do this because Senna, while not well-known in the NASCAR-obsessed United States, was, at his peak, one of Formula 1’s biggest stars. He was a national hero in his native Brazil, and almost everything he did, both on and off the track, was filmed. The amount of footage Kapadia and his 13-member editing crew, led by Chris King and Gregers Sall, had to work from is mind boggling, but they succeeded in organizing it all into a comprehensible and propulsive 106 minutes.

Senna’s interest in racing began in go-karts before graduating to the big show at age 24. He was personable, good looking, and immensely talented, which made him an instant media darling. He was also completely obsessed with racing and focused his entire life around winning the Formula 1 World Championships. This made for thrilling narratives for the fans but left his personal life seeming hollow. In 1988, he was asked to join the prestigious McLaren team, where he and his teammate Alain Prost dominated the sport, and he won his first championship. But in his second season with McLaren, jealousies flared, and he and Prost slid from friendship into bitter rivalry. In the final race of the season, Prost, who was slightly ahead in Formula 1’s confusing points system, deliberately rammed his car into Senna’s, taking them both out of the race and claiming the championship for himself. The next year, Senna thirsted for revenge, and he got it at great personal cost.

Kapadia’s remarkably clear direction traces Senna’s personal development from fresh-faced idealist fighting the Formula 1 bosses, to successful superstar to cynical competitor. At 33, he was an elder statesman of his sport; at 34, a martyr to its dark gods. Kapadia’s race sequences, culled from hundreds of cameras, are both coherent and thrilling. Senna’s career spanned a time of major leaps in video technology, so the steadily improving images trace the passage of time. Since miniaturized in-car cameras were developed in the late 1980s, Kapadia lets the damaged tape of Senna’s final lap play out in full, its encroaching video noise becomes symbolic of the dissolution of a life played out on camera.