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‘Back to Black’ Review: Marisa Abela Nails Amy Winehouse in Every Look, Mood and Note in a Biopic at Once Forthright and Forbidding
Sam Taylor-Johnson's jazz-meets-rock-star biopic exerts an authentic fascination, but its dysfunctional-addict love story keeps us at a distance.
The music has a crispy delicious retro-bop bounce, a quality that extends to Winehouse’s vocals, which take the growling-cat stylings of jazz legends like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday and kick them up into something playfully ferocious. From the start, she has an insolent, jutting-toothed, sensually hungry, the-girl-can’t-help-it grin that expresses her raw appetite for life, as well as a tough working-class accent (“together” comes out as “togevuh”) that signals she’s not taking any prisoners. The extended sequence in which Amy meets the sexy, indomitable Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) at a pub is a bravura piece of mutual seduction in which the film’s director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, shows off her chops.
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