RUNNING for 128 minutes, London-born filmmaker Asif Kapadia’s documentary about jazz singer Amy Winehouse is a collage of interviews with family and people involved in her life and career and movie images from her family archives and, not surprisingly, the media scavenging that no celebrity can avoid.

That intro, stating the bleeding obvious, should surprise nobody. Kapadia punctuates interviews, conversations, performances and still pix with an eclectic catalogue of moving images made of and around this young woman of Jewish extraction that should, rightly, have ended up in the editing suite trash can.

Backed by noisy music (percussion, plucked strings, voice – Amy insisted she never wanted strings backing her) those punctuations deliver visual interventions that are any or all of unfocused, badly lit, with content uncomposed or irrelevant. They drove me to the border of nausea.

Kapadia obviously had reasons for this invasion of an otherwise intelligent film that invites the filmgoer to take their minds beyond what’s on the screen and ask “why?” and “how?”. I interpret them as metaphors for the mental befuddlement that alcohol, party drugs, physical fatigue from a demanding profession and exhausting professional and personal relationships that blighted Amy’s life and took more from her than they gave back.

Amy wrote the lyrics of most of a repertoire that exposed her emotional turmoil. Helpfully, the texts accompany them on the screen. Hearing them with eyes closed often does not make them clear.

Her natural singing voice came from the adenoids more than the larynx. Like all modern jazz or rock singers, her voice would be close to inaudible were she not giving a blowjob to the microphone.

Kapadia’s construction of the film’s denouement is a masterly compendium of unhappy portents rising to the inevitable crescendo on the footpath outside her London house. The film makes no reference to the disposal of her estate. It provides the filmgoer with a sorrowful coda. Throughout, it does scant credit to the media, the music industry, her family or her lovers, who all exploited her.

With one exception. Near the end, an all-too-short passage during which Amy and Tony Bennett rehearse a duet is beautiful. And Bennett is in no doubt, as those moments confirm, that Amy was a jazz singer equal to those greats Ella and Billie.

At Palace Electric