Alexandra Shulman’s Notebook
Love... the drug that really felled tragic Amy
BACK To Black, the Amy Winehouse biopic, has been released to a cacophony of criticism. You can take your pick of the objections.
Marisa Abela doesn’t sing as well as Amy (of course she doesn’t); the portrayal of Amy’s junkie husband Blake Fielder-Civil is too kind; her cab driver father Mitch is too likeable – and so it goes on with everyone having their tuppence worth of memory.
I saw an early screening and very much enjoyed the film, especially Marisa’s touching performance as Amy, once described as a ‘North London Jewish girl with tons of attitude’.
A girl full of life and mischief with the powerful voice of a New York torch singer.
Although there are points to quibble at, critics have missed the central point and strength of director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film. It captures very powerfully what it is like as a young woman to fall fatally, hopelessly, in love with the wrong person.
Amy Winehouse became one of the most famous singers of her time but she was also a girl in her 20s who got swept up in a catastrophic love affair. Love was the drug that did her in, not the alcohol or narcotics.
Fielder-Civil was a scuzzy character and Jack O’Connell’s casting is too wholesome for the pallid, heroin needlethin guy he was in reality. But that’s the person Winehouse fell for.
Heaven knows, there are many of us who, at some point, have made bad decisions in love. We’ve been captivated by characters that all our friends and family knew were a bad idea. But did we listen? Did we care about their opinion? Who knows what it was about FielderCivil that utterly demolished Amy when he left her to return to his previous girlfriend, but not so demolished her that she couldn’t create sublime music. ‘You go back to her and I go back to black,’ as she wrote in the title song.
Marisa’s portrayal of the highs and lows of that relationship is compellingly convincing.
You feel her in thrall, both physically and emotionally, to him, and her absolute agony when he abandons her.
Biopics won’t ever tell the full story of a person’s life – they compress and shape in order to make a narrative work. And as we’ve seen in The Crown, the closer they are in time to the subject’s life, the more open they are to criticism that they aren’t faithful enough.
Even so, Back To Black does an excellent job at bringing to the screen the intensity of Amy’s emotions that inspired her great performances and songs.
Is the writing on the wall for Brooklyn?
AMY wrote her heart out in her songs, while Brooklyn Beckham is posting love letters to his wife Nicola on Instagram. Why would anyone do that?
Perhaps the answer is that while neither of the couple is having an easy time establishing any kind of career, their now two-year-old marriage is the best story Brooklyn can offer to his 16.4million Insta followers.
Nazanin proves we are what we wear
NAZANIN Zaghari-Ratcliffe tells of the power she felt when she was finally allowed to wear civilian clothes in her Iranian jail, rather than prisoners’ uniform. Clothes are a crucial part of our identity and not being allowed to wear what you choose is dehumanising – ask any teenage schoolgirl.
Uniforms strip people of individuality but give them an identity. The prison uniform is demeaning because it labels the wearer, no matter who they are, as just another inmate, while other uniforms such as those for the military are worn proudly.
During Covid, most of the people who kept the country running wore uniforms – supermarket staff, transport workers, NHS staff, firefighters. They won our respect. The big difference between them and Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s situation is that generally they wore the clothes through choice.
Why lunch is now the new dinner
LAST year I wrote about how people have begun to dine much earlier in London restaurants. Six months on, things have moved so early that lunch has become the new dinner. With lunch, you’ve got all afternoon and evening to work off the meal and a few glasses of wine, and then you don’t need to eat for the rest of the day, freeing it up for essential activity such as bingeing on a boxset.
Remote working means nobody knows or cares if you’ve taken a long midday break and for those on faddy time-restrictive fasting regimes you can stuff yourself at lunch and easily starve the required number of hours. If lunch is the new dinner, where does that leave breakfast?
Here’s one way to make us buy British
MANY people thought Brexit a good idea but I wonder if they’ve tried to return a skirt to a shop in Copenhagen, like me.
Having read that free returns were offered, I bought two, to have a choice of size. Silly me. I hadn’t seen that the offer only applies in the EU. Now I’m having to pay 50 per cent of the skirt’s value to send the wrong size back, as well as waste lots of time figuring out tiresome customs and DHL courier forms. I suppose all this is meant to encourage us to buy British.
I bet those bookies won at the National
INEVITABLY, I lost money on the Grand National.
Despite never picking a winner, placing a bet on this race is hardwired into me as an annual activity, having had a racing addict for a father.
He bet every afternoon, studying the chunky form books, which littered his desk, and phoning in bets to his account at William Hill.
I simply bet on names I like. Yesterday it was Foxy Jacks.
Despite evidence to the contrary, my dad was always convinced that, as an informed gambler, on balance he came out the winner. But in reality my haphazard method ends with the same result – a bonanza for the bookies.