Back to Black

Back to Black is a perceptive and compelling semi-bio-pic of Amy Winehouse’s life and strikes a satisfactory balance between light and dark, accentuating the drama and music. 

The tone for the film is authenticated by British actor Marisa Abela, whose performance flawlessly mimics Winehouse’s emotions, speech pattern, and musical expression. Abela is a force of nature and personifies all of the characteristics of Winehouse that her fans are familiar with, including her accustomed crazy, depressed, swollen-to-the-brim appearance. 

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson aimed for that Goldilocks neighbourhood, with this painstakingly calibrated – somewhat superficial – vision of the late Amy Winehouse, and succeeds admirably.

The screenplay was written by Matt Greenhalgh, who also happened to write Control and Nowhere Man, a portrait of John Lennon as a young man –  a much more in-depth look into the latter’s life, which was also directed by Taylor-Johnson. 

Sadly, Amy’s troublesome addictions are undermined by a poorly scripted story, that merely confirms what we already know, as the filmmakers deliberately chose not to stick to the motivations behind her often violent, abusive behaviour while under the influence of alcohol. 

This film also attempts to tell the same story from Amy’s perspective as the 2015 documentary, Amy, but it fails at the most important part: what was it about Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), the man who would become her inspiration and husband, that Amy found attractive but the rest of us didn’t? The character is invisible, and he’s not the man the paparazzi created. 

In a film style akin to a musical, less time is spent showing off the creative process of her songs. We are not shown the ingenious decisions Amy Winehouse made in the recording studio that catapulted her into the public eye or the subtle but powerful singer-songwriter, who won five Grammy Awards in a single night. 

The film’s narrative ultimately flows like a live performance, soundproof-padded with beats of melodrama, and through her thought process in creating her music in Back to Black, Amy Winehouse is often reduced to nothing more than a girl pining over a boy.

Back To Black releases in cinemas on Friday, 12 April 2024.

-Dirk Lombard Fourie