LE MONDE'S OPINION – SEE IT
The explosion of the biopic has long since gone beyond the mere fad stage to become a structuring phenomenon of the film industry. No part of cultural history is left untouched. It has to be absorbed, rewritten and molded into the form of a biopic. It has to devour everything, thereby reaching its cannibalistic stage. Each icon is doomed to be consumed by his double, his life cast in the exemplariness of a screenplay.
So it is with Amy Winehouse, who died tragically from an alcohol overdose in 2011, at the age of 27. The singer's brief, damaged fate was first captured in Amy (Asif Kapadia, 2015), a huge box-office success, as the collective imagination loves nothing more than the tragic deaths of its idols. This documentary reveled in all of the morbid images of Winehouse, fixating on her bulimia, her thinness, her increasingly outlandish concerts. Amy, the brunette Marilyn of our time, died from surrendering her body and soul to fame.
Amy was a difficult act to follow, especially for a drama that had to resolve the question of incarnation and try to breathe a little soul into the already thick specifications of the biopic genre.
Photographer and director Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy; Fifty Shades of Grey) achieves this astonishing feat by focusing her gaze on two things. The first and foremost is music – the music Winehouse listened to, the music she wrote – painting the portrait of a music-obsessed young woman stunned when she discovered the all-girl garage band The Shangri-Las.
And the other is love, ultimately inseparable from music. Back to Black focuses entirely on the destructive passion between the singer and Blake Fielder-Civil, who inspired her most beautiful songs. The film refuses to highlight good or bad points, preferring instead to depict the delirium of a two-person decline, of a love that consumes and is injected in very high doses. Taylor-Johnson cleverly illustrates how the songwriter threw herself wholeheartedly into heartache, drawing on it as material for her masterpiece, her second – and final studio album Back to Black. Inspiration, often obliterated in biopics, finds its rightful place here: Between the splendor of songs like "Valerie" and the mediocrity of her lover, there's a gulf that is exactly where the vertigo of the artistic gesture lies.
No biopic is complete without incarnation – in the quasi-Christian sense of the word. British actress Marisa Abela's performance, backed by impeccable artistic direction, brings the biopic's main interest to incandescence, a veritable acting laboratory accomplishing the prodigious feat of making two people inhabit a single body. Between mimicry and instinct, Abela makes Winehouse present: her cheekiness, her sixties beehive, her improbable outfits, her anorexic silhouette supported feverishly on stiletto heels.
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