Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson
Cast: Marisa Abela, Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan
Premiere: 31.05.24
Punctuation: * *
Happy scene with a British Jewish family singing a Hebrew song and then segueing into the classic song ‘Fly me to the moon’. This is followed by an unhappy scene of the same family. We warn that broken: Amy’s father takes her in his taxi to her mother’s house, from which she has been separated for a while. Everything has taken its toll Young Amy, who has an amazing voice and is a lover of blues, jazz and soul. But there was nothing like a thug named Blake Fielder entering her life. “I gotta live my songs,” Amy says at the beginning. And he experienced these. And he drank. The rest is history, ‘biopic’ material like ‘Back to Black’, which has the same title as the singer’s second and successful album.
Amy Winehouse brings it all together: alcohol, breakup, violence, drugs, paparazzi, bulimia, self-harm… Rise and fall. All conflicts linked to Blake. This doesn’t have to be true, the movie tells us, but dramatically – it’s still a movie – the incompetent, ‘bad boy’ (addict, drunk, unscrupulous) made him what he is. The film is boiled down to this point without delving into other aspects (e.g. the father’s role) and relying on the whole thing to be based on a very good performance. Marisa Abela is more than just a lookalike, with her bold lashes and vintage bouffant hair.