BACK TO BLACK****

Marisa Abella (Industry) delivers a stunning central performance as Amy Winehouse in this new biopic of the singer. She captures Amy's caustic wit, her physical mannerisms, and most impressively, her spoken and singing voice.  Director Sam Taylor-Wood (NOWHERE BOY) tackles the audience's apprehension head on in an opening scene showing Winehouse's Jewish parental family singing together. Abela freestyles Fly Me To The Moon and the audience relaxes, safe in the knowledge that Abela's Amy is spot on. Her Amy is straightforward to the point of rudeness, full of energy and sheer talent. But also troubled way before she meets her much vilified husband Blake Fielder-Civil. She is already bulimic and alcohol dependent with a self-acknowledged streak of self-sabotage, particularly when it comes to men. This is something that Matt Greenhalgh's script, using her own lyrics, explores from the first scenes.

About forty minutes into the film, Amy's first album has been a breakout success but she has been told to restyle herself for America. This plays into all of the insecurities that have fed into her self-abuse. And at that moment we meet Jack O'Connell (UNBROKEN) as Blake Fielder-Civil. He is charming and fun and has a deep knowledge of music over which he and Amy can bond. It's another powerhouse performance. There's an immediate spark and we are swept up in young, heedless romance.  According to this version of the story, it was a genuine love affair on both sides at first, and while he was already using Class A drugs she stuck "only" to alcohol and weed. It's only when they reunite after a break-up that he was motivated more by her fame and money and ability to fund his smack habit.  Once inside prison, he cleans up and realises what's obvious to the rest of us - that this is a desperately toxic codependent relationship with competitive self-harm. He wants to break free. Fair enough. But it breaks Amy in the process.

Needless to say, this is a more nuanced and sympathetic portrait of Fielder-Civil than we got from contemporary news reports, or from Asif Kapadia's superb 2015 documentary AMY. My only criticism of Kapadia is that he often creates pantomime villains in his films - whether Alain Prost in SENNA or Fielder-Civil and Mitch Winehouse in AMY.  Greenhalgh and Taylor-Wood may have swung the pendulum back too far in BACK TO BLACK but I really appreciate the attempt to treat humans as flawed real people. And we have to remember that Fielder-Civil was also a young man and an addict at the time. 

The whitewashing of Mitch Winehouse, played by the innately sympathetic Eddie Marsan, is probably going to be even more controversial.  In this film, he is portrayed as an indulgent father who is totally out of his depth when it comes to Amy's addictions. This kind of tracks with Amy's mother saying, in Kapadia's documentary, that when Amy told them about her bulimia they just kind of ignored it and hoped it would pass. We don't see the avaricious exploitative father of Kapadia's doc at all.

But let's not be fooled into thinking this film is a whitewashing of the brutality of addiction and bulimia.  Amy's descent into full blown class A drug addiction is shown explicitly, but never exploitatively. We see her ability to go clean for periods, but that she is, in the scripts words, always on edge, so that it doesn't take much to push her over. In this film, it's always heartbreak that does it - whether Fielder-Civil leaving her, or her inability to get pregnant and have the stable family life she craved.  The narrative is convincing, and Abela's central performance is heartbreaking.  I love that we spent so much time with Amy and her beloved Nan (Leslie Manville) and saw that Amy's heart was rooted in jazz. I felt I had an understanding of her deep familial musical heritage that I didn't get from Kapadia's doc.  And this is, I think, one of the most important things that we need to know about her.

BACK TO BLACK is rated R and has a running time of 122 minutes. It went on release in the UK today and goes on release in the USA on May 17th.

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - Day 1 - THE LOOK OF LOVE

I find Steve Coogan fascinating but I suspect he finds himself even moreso. Why else does he persist in authoring projects where he plays refracted versions of himself? The chippy Northerner with unreal talent, parleying that into success with radical and daring work - super confident to the outside world and yet always eager to tell us just how well-read he is - commercially brilliant but with a controversial and unconventional private life. Charming, subversive and slippery. That's my take on Coogan. It would also be a good description of the character Coogan played in Michael Winterbottom's superb Tony Wilson biopic, 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE. And it's also a good description of the legendary Soho strip club owner and property mogul, Paul Raymond - the subject of the latest Winterbottom-Coogan collaboration.

As the film shows us, Raymond had an uncanny ability to make money, pushing the boundaries of UK legislation in producing nude shows and magazines. Cleverly investing the money in property, he became Britain's richest man. But this is contrasted with his literally pathetic personal life, as signalled by the movie's title, THE LOOK OF LOVE. And here we get into the most slippery territory of all.

Despite running strip clubs and porno mags (a description he always, somewhat disingenuously, denied), it's not clear that Raymond disrespected or degraded women. He seems to carry no malice. Both of his long term partners, his wife Jean (Anna Friel) and his girlfriend Fiona (Tamsin Egerton), left him because they tired of what were up until then consensually open relationships. He never leers or gropes or openly exploits. There's something charmingly honest and open about him.

If anything, his sad fault seems to be a more general lack of empathy - a kind of emotional neutering. When his wife leaves with his son, he seems to simply turn off any remembrance of him. When his illegitimate son turns up, he's charming for one night, as one might charm a business acquaintance, but then shakes his hand and sends him on his way. He seems to love his wife and girlfriend, but not to the point of giving them the monogamy that they want.

And then there's the pivotal relation with his daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots), who longs for a career as a singer and is groomed to take over his empire. Paul seems to love her but in a completely unboundaried way that involves exercising no parental discipline. When he catches her doing coke with a marvellously bearded and sinister Chris Addison, he just tells her to do the best quality, and is seemingly blind to her inner despair.

In the end, what do we learn about Paul? That he was a charming, highly talented businessmen with very messy relationships. It was arguably better to be ignored by him than loved by him: his love involved a fair amount of delusion and denial. I felt bad for him. I wondered if he succeeded in impressing himself? Whether knowing Ringo Starr had designed his flat reassured him that he'd arrived. But this was a man so conscious of his own public image, so polished and repressed that one hardly scratches the surface with this film.

And what of the film? The production design, score, casting are all superb. I love the way Winterbottom's fluid handheld camera brings us right into the action and emotion, and the editing that beautifully juxtaposes a funeral with a wedding. But the movie is not as consistently high energy as 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE or A COCK AND BULL STORY nor as formally daring as TRISHNA. Rather, it's a basically linear biopic that largely reduces a complex man to one tragic relationship. And sadly, when that relationship takes centre stage roughly half way through the film, it dramatically loses pace.

THE LOOK OF LOVE has a running time of 101 minutes. The movie played Sundance 2013 and will be released in the UK on April 26th, in Australia on April 27th and in the Netherlands on August 22nd.

NOWHERE BOY - suprisingly conventional Lennon biopic

NOWHERE BOY is a beautifully written, beautifully acted, sensitively directed biopic of the young John Lennon, directed by the reknowned British artist, Sam Taylor-Wood. Set in a perfectly rendered 1950s Liverpool, the film shows a 17 year old Lennon groping toward the truth of why he lives with his Aunt Mimi rather than with his mum and dad, not to mention taking his first steps toward becoming a Beatle.

Aaron Johnson (THE THIEF LORD; ANGUS, THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING) is assured as the young Lennon, complete with rock-n-roll quiff and iconic Scouse accent. He pulls off both the cockey laddishness and the vulnerability. His John is witty and playful; promiscuous and arrogant; occasionally violently angry; but also desperately adrift. Kristin Scott-Thomas also gives a nuanced performance as John's Aunt Mimi - both stiff and severe in her middle-class home, but also undoubtedly very loving toward John and possessing a wicked sense of humour. (And to those reviewers criticising Scott Thomas for being too posh, Mimi really didn't have a broad Scouse accent. Indeed, Lennon later commented that he had to broaden his Scouse accent for PR purposes.)

The character that jumps off the screen is John's mum, and Mimi's younger sister, Julia. Anne-Marie Duff's Julia is so full of energy and fun that she simply sweeps you up in her love of life and rock'n'roll music. But like John you can't help but feel something is forced in such buoyancy and we're right to distrust it. Despite being remarried with two small children, Julia obviously suffers from depression and can only truly relate to men through flirtation. This extends to John and his band members, and the delicate way in which Sam Taylor-Wood and her script-writer deal with this is both honest and elegant.

The resulting film is a moving emotional drama that is interesting on its own terms, let alone because it formed an iconic musician.

NOWHERE BOY is a very good film. It reminded me a lot of Tom Ford's feature debut A SINGLE MAN, in that it was both apparently conventional in its structure and visual style but also wonderfully brave in tackling uncomfortable subjects head on, without judgement and without cliché. The conventional style is even more surprising from Taylor-Wood given the nature of her graphic art, and her bizarre short film.

NOWHERE BOY closed London 2009 and is currently on release in the UK and Australia. It will play Sundance 2010. It opens in New Zealand on March 4th; in the Netherlands on April 1st; in Russia on April 15th and in Norway on September 10th.