PERSONAL LOSS (RECLAIMING AMY)

The clue is in the title.

With its name, Marina Parker's BBC2 documentary 'Reclaiming Amy' very much pitches itself up against Asif Kapadia's powerful 2015 Oscar winning documentary 'Amy'.

However 'Reclaiming Amy' is more than just about a title.

It's an intimate, warts and all portrait of a troubled singer with her mum Janis narrating.

However Parker's film also enables Janis, her ex husband Mitchell and friends to bite back at the narrative in Kapadia's documentary.

Ten years on from the tragic death of the singer-songwriter, it is an emotional watch, providing a different account of a life that just spiralled out of control.

Using a mixture of home video and archive footage of gigs and weaving interviews with family and friends, the film inevitably covers similar ground to 'Amy' but disputes Kapadia's interpretation of some of the facts.

The documentary begins with Winehouse preparing sound levels for a TV interview by introducing herself as "Hello. I am Amy. I write songs and I sing."

She rushes it, sighs and does it all again - an early glimpse of the demands on a celebrity uncomfortable with the huge level of fame she achieved.

'Reclaiming Amy' then eerily segues into one of Winehouse's most iconic stripped back performances of the song 'Back to Black' for Irish television's live music show 'Other Voices,' recorded for RTE2 in a church in the coastal town of Dingle, Co Kerry.

After zoning in on the song's lines "We only said goodbye with words/I died a hundred times/You'll go back to her/And I go back to black," 'Reclaiming Amy' sets out its stall early.

Over archive footage of floral tributes to the fallen star outside her Camden home and images of her grieving parents, Janis' narrative begins: "My daughter Amy died when she was just 27 years old."

Then over a photo of them laughing, she adds: "I will always remember our last words. I said 'I love you Amy'. She said 'I love you mummy'.

"And I can always remember the love she had for me - always there...

"You think you know my daughter - the drugs, the addiction, the destructive relationships - but there was so much more."

It is a heartbreaking, direct and also intensely personal moment and it sets the tone for a desperately sad tale of a family trying to save a loved one from the ravages of addiction.

It doesn't take long for Janis to land a blow on Kapadia's acclaimed documentary over images of him receiving his Academy Award, observing that 'Amy' "claimed to tell the real story about our daughter".

She opines: "I just don't think the film really did Amy justice. She was a caricature."

Mitch also doesn't hold back, revealing he had a nervous breakdown following the release of the documentary which depicted him as exploiting her fame when she was ill.

We see the former London taxi driver and crooner listening to his daughter singing 'Me and Mr Jones' on his Amazon Alexa, which he accidentally calls Amy - revealing it took him eight years to be able to listen to her voice again following her death.

Interviews from four friends, Michael, her stylist Naomi, Caitriona and Chantelle reveal their desire to also set the record straight after the intense media circus that catalogued her downward spiral.

They vigorously dispute the suggestion that the family did little to help Amy.

What emerges in the film is a portrait of a volatile, strong willed but extremely charismatic soul whose talent stood out at an early age, playing Rizzo during a school production of 'Grease' with a striking maturity to her voice.

Following her parents divorce, it shows how Amy rebelled as a teenager and gave her mum a hard time, running wild.

However it also shows how she enjoyed a close relationship with her paternal grandmother Cynthia.

And then fame hit after a stunning debut album 'Frank' which took the 2004 Mercury Prize for Album of the Year - the top award in Britain's music industry.

Catapulted into the spotlight, the film, like Kapadia's, shows how ill equipped she was for the level of fame she achieved and did not want.

Addiction to drugs, drink and a destructive relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil purported to offer her some escape routes but they ultimately took a toll on her in the full gaze of the tabloid media.

Stung by the public's belief that they did little to stop the downward spiral, 'Reclaiming Amy,' shows how the family tried to extricate Amy from the mess.

"She wanted to be famous. She wanted to be successful," Naomi observes.

"And the  when she got it, it was like: Oh God!"

Like Kapadia's film, 'Reclaiming Amy' argues her inability to cope with stratospheric levels of fame combined with the loss of Mitchell Winehouse's mum Cynthia were ultimately fatal blows to the singer.

With no matriarch to guide him, Mitchell Winehouse admits "mistakes were made because the wise one of the family had gone" - although Parker does not really probe this further which seems like a missed opportunity.

Janis, Mitchell and her friends insist the fault for her demise doesn't lie with family. 

Interventions were made to wean her off her addiction to drugs, only for her to substitute it for drink in her final years.

The portrait painted of the singer is that of a complex figure, with Caitriona revealing she had an intense relationship with Winehouse who she hints was conflicted about her sexuality, referring to an interview in which Amy remarked that after four Sambucas, she could be a lesbian.

Footage of her being interviewed by Caitriona, who aspired in her twenties to be a TV presenter, adds to the sense of intimacy around Parker's film as we see Janis and Mitchell also leafing through mementos, her wardrobe and watching home videos of her throughout her life.

As a result, 'Reclaiming Amy' is a devastatingly personal account of family grappling with a loved one's mental health and addiction struggles and then plunged into grief under the gaze of a hungry media pack.

Such is the struggle it portrays that you wonder if anything could have been done to save her.

However the film shows how the family has taken the experience and set up a foundation in her name which supports music therapy projects around the world and also young women with addiction problems.

Does Parker's film, however, achieve its aim of reclaiming the real Amy?

While not as slick as Kapadia's film, the answer is probably - thanks to the testimony of her friends.

Although as with all films about real people, fictional and factual, it is a particular take on a life and you cannot help feeling that in service of its narrative it may choose to overlook certain aspects of the singer's life.

Unlike 'Amy,' the destructive relationship with Fielder-Civil is mentioned but is not really explored - presumably because the family and director feel it covers well worn ground and doesn't really help recalibrate her public image. 

However the film does shine a new light on what she was like away from the cameras - something we only caught glimpses of in Kapadia's documentary.

"The way Amy turned out wasn't because she wasn't raised right," Michael, a friend from her primary school days, insists.

"Addiction is the culprit," Mitchell Winehouse argues and it is hard to disagree.

Although addiction is often encouraged and exploited by individuals which this film just seems unwilling to examine. 

But while the world continues to muse on what happened to her and what might have been, we still have the unique voice and the music.

Amid all the pain and the sorrow, that really is worth treasuring.

('Reclaiming Amy' was broadcast on BBC2 on July 23, 2021)

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