Amy is more than a great doc. It is a shot to the solar plexus… I imagine, even more so for those of us who cover Hollywood or celebrities than anyone else outside of her personal friends. Asif Kapadia not only creates an intense intimacy with a massively talented singer and songwriter who has become a cartoon character of insobriety, but in telling her tale, he points a finger at many, including the media machine.

We, the media, are accomplices in the murder of Amy Winehouse. No doubt, her parents and her ex-husband are much higher on the list of causes of her tragic death at the comedic/horrible oft-repeated celebrity death age of 27. We are complicit. As another writer smartly offered, Kapadia makes us complicit specifically in the act of watching the doc, much of which is built on paparazzi footage. But I take a step further. As we cover this festival of a billion flashes without blinking an eye… many of us pushing snippets of the lives of the talent that is here endlessly for weeks before and through the 10 days of the festival… profiting by minimizing and disrespecting the integrity of artistic effort on display at Cannes… we brew a potion that is deadly for some, crippling for others, and yes, a non-issue for yet others. But it is too easy to simply point the finger at the obvious targets of Amy Winehouse’s parents or his heroin-pushing boyfriend. The hands of the media are not clean.

Perhaps the most horrible part of Amy is that she wasn’t, as she is most often portrayed in the media, a lost cause without a support system. She had people who really loved her and who she could trust. She had friends and family. She even had good fortune, in terms of circumstances changing to her advantage at times (like her husband being jailed at one point).

The film is an intense reminder that celebrities are actually real people… that they live day-to-day when we are not watching via the media… that they have insecurities and virtues and vices that are not meant for us, the public. The film didn’t anger and pain me about the infrastructure of celebrity. As many have said, some handle it better and some worse. It was the casualness with which Winehouse was painted into Class Lunatic that makes me enraged at the whole enterprise. She may have died either way. But we, in the press, held her life so cheaply.

The film starts with pre-teen Amy and works its way through her early work, her emancipation, the lukewarm success of “Frank” in the UK, and everything that happened once “Rehab” made her a worldwide superstar virtually overnight. After a while, the viewer can do a lot of the work for themselves, having perspective on Winehouse’s behavior and physical state from before, during, and after her falls from sobriety.

Much as Senna did, Amy doesn’t allow talking heads, though Kapadia seems to have done a lot of audio interviews and does have a couple of talking heads, borrowed directly from other Amy Winehouse-related TV efforts. But the storytelling is slick, clean, and seamless. And when it ends, you have lost not only a legendary talent, but a friend.

I haven’t felt the emotional hammer come down like this in Cannes since Amour. It took me more than an hour to recover. I may not actually be recovered. I may never quite be the same. I am seeing the world, and more specifically my work, through Amy-colored glasses right now. And I hope not to forget that feeling as, through the normal course of work, I feel that urge to not show enough respect to the talent, or anyone really.

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