2024-04-13 15:43:04
Most of all, the music and lyrics of the English singer Amy Winehouse were guided by the director Sam Taylor-Johnson when she made a feature film about her. Czech cinemas will start screening the biographical film Back to Black next month. It commemorates the fate of the musician who died in 2011 from alcohol poisoning. She was only 27 years old.
“I wanted to tell the story from her point of view, to give her back the voice she lost a little when she became a victim of her tragedy,” explains the director. “I followed her music and lyrics the most. I thought she deserved such an honor,” she adds.
The film depicts the rise and fall of one of the most talented English singers of her generation, who mixed pop with soul and R&B. She had a distinctive style. Her typical features were her matted hair, thick black eyeliner, large colorful earrings, tattoos and a husky voice. All this, combined with drugs, alcohol and a stormy personal life, contributed to the fact that Amy Winehouse was haunted by the boulevard every year.
The film is named after her second and final album, 2006’s Back to Black, which won five Grammy Awards. It also included the autobiographical hit about the fight against addiction, Rehab. This topic is also addressed in the film, which further outlines the singer’s relationship with her parents or husband Blake Fielder-Civil, with whom she eventually divorced after various drug and violent excesses.
The heroine is played by the Englishwoman Marisa Abela, who today is the same age as Amy Winehouse at the time of her death. “You don’t get roles like this every day,” he notes. “Amy was smart, funny, brave, brave, but at the same time incredibly vulnerable and full of emotions. And that’s what I wanted to show her. To remind people who was the girl behind all the music,” she adds.
Marisa Abela sings herself in the film. The preparations took her four months, during which, among other things, she delved into the lyrics of Amy Winehouse.
The AFP agency writes that the project has already caused embarrassment. “Given that people flocked like vultures to anything related to her life, it’s really hard to justify this film. Of course, if it wasn’t made just for money,” journalist Roisin O’Connor stated in The Independent, for example, according to which she would people would do better to listen to Amy Winehouse’s music.
Her life was already summarized in the documentary Amy in 2015. Directed by Asif Kapadia and won an Oscar for it, the film climbed to number two in the UK box office.
But the singer’s father Mitch Winehouse criticized it as cheap, sensational and misleading.
On the contrary, both the foundation managing the singer’s legacy and both parents consecrated the live news. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson met Mitch Winehouse and his now ex-wife Janis in person.
“I didn’t need anyone’s approval. I really made the film exactly the way I wanted without anyone interfering,” she forwards. “However, out of respect, I thought it was right to get to know the family when I am filming about their daughter. The fact that they then approved the film when they saw it makes me happy, of course,” he admits.
Back to Black will be shown in Czech cinemas on May 16. | Video: CinemArt
Mitch Winehouse is played by Eddie Marsan. According to him, the creators tried “not to take the easiest way” and did not suggest that someone else was responsible for the singer’s tragedy. Either ex-husband Fielder-Civil, who led Amy Winehouse to heroin and said in 2018 that he would “never forgive himself”, or her father.
“Mitch was in an unsolvable situation. He loved his daughter, but she became a drug addict. At the same time, she was incredibly famous, followed at every turn by the paparazzi. She had unlimited resources and money. Every drug dealer in London was trying to get to her,” suggests Marsan.
According to the director, the film does not portray the protagonists in an unambiguously positive or exclusively negative light. “The only real villains in the film are the addiction and then the persistent paparazzi. Otherwise, it’s up to the viewer to take it,” adds Sam Taylor-Johnson.
The 57-year-old director of the films Fifty Shades of Gray or Nowhere Boy, in which she told about John Lennon’s youth in 2009, hopes that the singer would be happy with the film. “That she would be pleased to see how her music has stood the test of time. And that we still have a reason to celebrate her,” he adds.
Initial reactions are mixed. According to The Times, the authors avoided excessive sensationalism about drugs or bulimia, with which the singer struggled. For example, the scenes from its beginnings seem apt, and Mitch Winehouse also looks much better in the film than in Asif Kapadia’s documentary. Still, something is missing for complete success, according to The Times, which gave the film three out of five stars.
He earned one less in the Financial Times, which sees nothing extraordinary in the news. And it was awarded only one star out of five by the Evening Standard, according to which the film is “just terribly, terribly bad at the most basic level”.
The Guardian notes that the film is heading to theaters at a time that favors musical biographies. After the recent successes of Bohemian Rhapsody about the singer Freddie Mercury and Elton about the pianist Elton John, pictures about Elvis and Priscilla hit the cinemas. Before Christmas, Maestro, about the conductor Leonard Bernstein, appeared on Netflix. This year, Czechs could also see a film about reggae star Bob Marley.
According to the author of the text in the Guardian, most of these works were weaker than the award-winning movies about Ray Charles and Johnny Cash from the beginning of the millennium. Still, most of them have paid off, which is why studios are making more. Timothée Chalamet is currently shooting a film about Bob Dylan, director Sam Mendes has announced four pictures about the Beatles, while Jeremy Allen White, known from the series about the cook Bear, will probably portray Bruce Springsteen.