Back to Black

Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson (France, UK, USA). Year of Release: 2024

North London, 2002. A teenage girl who looks slightly familiar walks through her manor. When she gets home, her family are singing in Hebrew in the parlour around the piano. After a while, they beckon her over to sing something. She gives a perfect rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon”, accompanied by the slightly more flawed voice of her father. Before the evening is over, she leaves her father and his family to return to her room in the house of her mother.

Back to Black sets the basic exposition fairly quickly. Amy Winehouse is from a Jewish working class family. She loves both her parents, even though they are separated, and has a special place in her heart for her Nan Cynthia, who used to be a night club singer. There is something very EastEnders about the film’s insistence that the only really important thing in life is famly. This may be a cliché but at least it means that the Amy we see is grounded and not too prone to taking on airs.

When we meet her, Amy is a moderately successful pub singer, with a boyfriend who is touting her around potential managers. If the boyfriend were female, he’d be called frigid, and he immediately looks too white bread for his more adventurous partner. The relationship doesn’t survive the audition which he arranges for her with a bigshot manager. In the middle of a song, the boyfriend realises that Amy’s lyrics about an emasculated hopeless bloke are a little too close to home.

Girl Power is still in vogue, but Amy insists that “I ain’t no Spice Girl”. When she is compared to MOR acts like Dido or Katie Melua she visibly bristles. At one stage she says that she’s not a feminist because she likes boys too much. In another voiceover she explains that her feminism is about Sarah Vaughn and Lauryn Hill. It isn’t that she doesn’t believe in strong women, she just doesn’t like the contemporary packaging which reduces fighting for equality to a glossy advert.

Amy’s strong-headed autonomy makes her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil all the more interesting. Although Fielder-Civil is largely depicted as the arsehole that he almost certainly was, he shows enough charm for us to see what Amy saw in him. In a face off in the Good Mixer, he first buys her a drink, then retreats to the pool room to play with his mates, letting her chase him. He then impresses her by introducing her to the Shangri Las and dancing along to Leader of the Pack.

Amy’s career gradually gains traction. Island Records show an interest, but their marketing department want to take control. Amy’s debut album shouldn’t be released in the States quite yet, and she should drop her guitar playing to concentrate on her stage presence. Amy rejects all attempts to manipulate her performance out of hand, but is appalled when her father Mitch sides with the record company. There is a hint that this is the stage where the authenticity got lost.

Blake is heavily into Class A drugs, which initially horrifies Amy, especially when he leaves one of her gigs to take cocaine with his mates. Nonetheless, she is increasingly drawn into his lifestyle. Before the film has ended, her house is raided by police who storm in on Blake and Amy naked in bed. When the drug squad ask if there are any illegal substances on the premises, Blake gives the film’s best line: “No, I think we took them all”.

Although the film does keep coming back to the music (and given as this is the music of Amy fucking Winehouse, it really should), it spends far too much time on her relationship with a relatively uninteresting blokey bloke. We are spared the embarrassment of Amy singing “Free Blakey My Fella” in a song about a leader of the fight against apartheid, but for all his charm, there is not enough warmth to Fielder-Civil for us to mourn his loss from and return to her life.

We do get the feeling that we are watching the approved version of Amy’s story, where no-one comes out looking too bad. Fielder-Civil is more charming than obnoxious and manipulative – permanently scared that his wife will leave him for someone more famous than him. And her taxi-driver father Mitch is played by Eddie Marsden as an affable English football manager type, someone you can’t trust to always say the right thing, but is basically a Good Bloke.

There are few new insights about Winehouse’s life, but is that really the job of film drama? If we want that, there’s already Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy. Back to Black is one to lie back to and enjoy the music. And the music is great. We knew that already, but Marisa Abela has a way of inhabiting Amy which adds a certain authenticity. Some critics have dismissed the film as a Stars in Your Eyes type minstrel show, but if the performance is this good, what’s the problem with that?

Nonetheless, there is something about the film which doesn’t hold together. We see a string of great songs, but receive little insight about how they got made, or what – apart from a generally equivocal love life – inspired Winehouse to write them. You can learn loads from just listening to the song Back in Black (especially its final notes – how strange the change from major to minor), but little in the film offers any illumination about just why it is as good as it is.

So yes, on one level, Back to Black, the film, is an extremely sanitised version of a life which contained much happiness, ended in a tragic death, and still wants us to clap along. It is a string of hummable songs connected by dramatic scenes which will not remain in our brains long after we have seen them. But what songs. And what a performer. Even if Marisa Abela’s mimicry is only a shadow of Amy at her best, she still delivers an unforgettable performance which stays with us.