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For me, probably the most visceral a part of the brand new Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black starring Marisa Abela was her sneakers. The picture of Winehouse, strolling down the streets of London in these tiny, flimsy ballet slippers, staring mournfully on the paparazzi that harassed her till her loss of life, is a type of indelible moments from 2000s popular culture which might be perpetually imprinted on my mind. I don’t suppose there’s a former Perez Hilton reader alive who might watch Amy, performed by Abela, strut down the road in a facsimile of those self same sneakers, and never really feel a tragic queasiness of guilt for collaborating in her trauma, regardless of if it was simply from a display.
Throughout her lifetime, Amy Winehouse was a controversial determine, one who it appears the mainstream media didn’t know what to do with. To them, it felt incongruous that somebody who might pen the soulful, lovely songs on her debut album Frank and multi-Grammy successful breakthrough Again to Black is also, nicely, an advanced particular person, combating demons and addictions. After she grew to become well-known for her music, Winehouse started to be relentlessly stalked by the tabloids, who referred to as her merciless names and mocked her viscously. Then, after her 2011 loss of life from alcohol poisoning, we started to reexamine our conduct, as we've for equally “messy” ladies from the ‘90s and 2000s. The culture quickly started to decry her treatment, calling her a victim.
But Winehouse was something much more poignant than either of these portrayals. Simply put, she was a nuanced woman, the kind that our society struggles to digest. But Abela is hoping that her film, which is released in the US on Friday, will start to change that.
“What we've done with our film, I really think, is give Amy some semblance of her power back,” Abela says. “She was such a ferocious artist and a fiery woman. She was so alive and present and capable and talented, and the discourse for so long has been one of a victim. And she was a victim of addiction, and she was a victim of a culture that was obsessed with her, but she was a powerful artist. I think adding that back into the conversation is important.”
Not long after beginning work on the film, Abela began to get a small taste of what Winehouse had gone through. After photos emerged of her filming on the streets of London, the internet had a field day, picking apart the movie before they’d even seen a scene. For Abela, the response and a focus have been solely reminders of how massive of a expertise Winehouse was.
“I can completely understand that the thing about musicians is that people have such personal relationships with them,” she says. “It's why biopics do well at the cinema because people are interested, but there's also just a lot of emotion wrapped around it. That doesn't really have anything to do with me as a person. It's more to do with the individual's personal relationships to Amy. And that's completely understandable.”
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