THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
The explosion of the biopic has long since gone beyond the simple fashion effect stage to become a structuring phenomenon in the film industry. Not a part of cultural history is left alone today: it must be entirely absorbed, rewritten and molded into the form of the biopic. The show must suck up everything, thus reaching its cannibalistic stage. Each icon is doomed to be devoured by its double, sees its life cast in the exemplary scenario.
This is the case with Amy Winehouse, who tragically died in 2011 of an alcohol overdose at the age of 27. The singer’s brief and turbulent destiny was first captured in Amy (Asif Kapadia, 2015), a huge success in theaters as the collective imagination loves nothing less than the tragic deaths of its idols. The documentary feasted on the slightest morbid image of Winehouse, emphasizing her bulimia, her thinness, her increasingly lunar concerts. Amy or the brunette Marilyn of our time, dead from having been surrendered body and soul to fame.
It was not easy to move on, especially for a fiction that must resolve the question of incarnation and try to breathe a little soul into the already thick specifications of the biopic.
Destructive passion
This is very astonishingly what photographer and director Sam Taylor-Johnson manages to do (Nowhere Boythe first part of Fifty Shades of grey) by focusing her gaze on two things: music, first and foremost, the music that Amy Winehouse listened to, the music she wrote, painting the portrait of a young music-loving woman, sawed on the spot by her discovery of the group of female garage The Shangri-Las.
And then love, ultimately inseparable from music. Back to Black then focuses entirely on the destructive passion between the singer and Blake Fielder-Civil, who inspired her most beautiful songs. The film refuses to distribute good and bad points, preferring to depict the delight of a decline between two, of a love that consumes and that we inject in very high doses. Sam Taylor-Johnson quite intelligently shows how the composer threw herself headlong into heartache to draw the material for her album and masterpiece Back to Black. Inspiration, often obliterated in the biopic, finds its full place here: between the splendor of songs like Valerie and the mediocrity of the lover, there is a whole gap where the vertigo of the artistic gesture resides precisely.
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