Cannes 2015: Amy Winehouse, Cate Blanchett on dangerous ground

Vocal powerhouse Amy Winehouse dominated the 2008 Grammys with her album “Back to Black.” Three years later she was dead from alcohol poisoning compounded by drug addiction. The strong, sobering new documentary “Amy” from “Senna” director Asif Kapadia, which premiered Saturday at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, is made up of often terrifying footage culled from mainstream media sources. The media helped make her and, the film argues vividly without ever saying it in words, helped destroy her.

Kapadia also deploys a wealth (if that’s the word) of ostensibly private cellphone video footage, home movie stuff, shot in cars, backstage, at her home in Camden when she was deep into crack cocaine. “Amy” in its totality is a film about a woman who rarely enjoyed an un-filmed moment in her 27 years.

Without a heavy hand, Kapadia’s “Amy” depicts a musical phenomenon afflicted with a father who saw nothing wrong with dragging a reality-TV crew with him to visit his daughter in recovery. It paints Winehouse as a fantastically exuberant, self-destructive fatalist who knew the terrors of fame and her own insecurity would drive her insane, or worse.

“Senna,” Kapadia’s superb documentary about Brazilian Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna, has something “Amy” does not, and I hope to figure out what that something is when I see “Amy” a second time closer to its U.S. premiere. (A24 puts it out in the U.S. sometime this summer; the movie opens in England in early July.) There are moments in “Amy” when the techniques deployed by Kapadia, relating to pathos-inducing slow motion or obvious musical cueing, land too close to conventional VH1 “Behind the Music” material for comfort.

But the best of “Amy” is far better than that. This is not an easy train wreck to watch, but it actually says something about how we package, revere, undermine and chew through all sorts of talent today. Seeing the film at Cannes, the epicenter of paparazzi-infested media attention this month, added another layer of irony to this cautionary tale.

“Amy” played out of competition. In competition, and worthy of it, was Todd Haynes’ “Carol,” starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in screenwriter Phyllis Nagy’s adaptation of the 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel “The Price of Salt.” The press screening Saturday evening was greeted warmly, and jury co-presidents Joel and Ethan Coen may be favorably inclined to go with Blanchett for best actress next weekend.

Haynes’s previous period dramas include the HBO miniseries “Mildred Pierce” and, flooded with its visual ardor for Douglas Sirk melodramas, “Far From Heaven.” The latter clearly provided Haynes with a few signposts regarding “Carol,” which exists as a period piece in the realm where forbidden desires meet highly color-coded and meticuliously coiffed post-World War II fashion statements.

Highsmith’s novel had a rare happy-ish ending for its time, given its lesbian characters. In the film the forbidden desire is fulfilled after a long, patient simmer in a hotel-room encounter, when the bisexual society wife and mother (Blanchett), locked in a custody battle with her bitter husband (Kyle Chandler) well aware of his wife’s history, finally shares a bed with the department store clerk and aspiring photographer played by Mara.

Set in 1952 and early ’53, the film was shot largely in Cincinnati substituting, not always convincingly, for New York City. Blanchett is a formidable screen presence. I’m still trying to figure out if everything she does in “Carol” is right for the character, and for the period. Blanchett gives you a lot, every second. Sometimes the Sirkian critique becomes sly, witty caricature, though never unfelt or unfeeling. That said, Blanchett is so spectacular in a key late scene, set in a lawyer’s office, the performance becomes a different performance, and the film becomes a different, subtler, richer sort of film.

I’ll see it again to find out if my second encounter amplifies my first. Distributed by the Weinstein Company, “Carol” is due later this year.

mjphillips@tribune.com