SIFF - Dreams Of A Life
Uptown Theater
Dreams of a Life
I read about Joyce's story in December. I was truly moved and it made me reflect on life. When I saw this playing at SIFF, I had to see it. It was an amazing production!
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http://dreamsofalife.com/
http://dreamsofalife.com/press
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Would anyone miss you? Nobody noticed when Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London in 2003.
Her body wasn’t discovered for three years, surrounded by Christmas presents she had been wrapping, and with the TV still on. Newspaper reports offered few details of her life– not even a photograph.
Interweaving interviews with imagined scenes from Joyce’s life, Dreams of a Life is an imaginative, powerful, multilayered quest, and is not only a portrait of Joyce but a portrait of London in the eighties—the City, music, and race. It is a film about urban lives, contemporary life, and how, like Joyce, we are all different things to different people. It is about how little we may ever know each other, but nevertheless, how much we can love.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/dec/15/dreams-of-a-life-film-review
All the lonely people … where do they all come from? Documentary film-maker Carol Morley has focused on where one of them ended up, a modern-day Eleanor Rigby. It's a story both horrifying and heartbreaking. Reporting on this movie's premiere at the London Film festival earlier this year, I wrote that it lingered persistently in my mind, and it lingers still, like a melody of desperate sadness. Apart from having a gripping story to tell, this is a film with real questions to ask about sexual politics and the welfare state.
Vincent had had a record of hospital admissions, so it was possible this had been a medical crisis. She had spent time in a women's refuge, so murder or suicide, although unlikely, could not be entirely ruled out. Carbon monoxide poisoning from some inadequately maintained boiler is perhaps another marginal possibility, but the grim and extraordinary fact is that Joyce Vincent's corpse had been there simply too long for the facts to be clearly established. She was not a drug addict or an alcoholic, but an attractive and sociable, if somewhat secretive person, with a wide circle of acquaintances. Agonisingly, her corpse was surrounded by Christmas presents, which she had just wrapped. How could she have been so isolated? How could her death have gone unnoticed? Morley tracks down and interviews her friends, colleagues and ex-boyfriends, and stages dramatised reconstructions with actor Zawe Ashton in the Vincent role. She seeks to excavate, as if in some imaginative act of contemporary psycho-archaeology, the kind of person Vincent was, and the kind of society that let her down.
Everybody knows how Bridget Jones feared ending up alone, and being discovered dead after three weeks half-eaten by alsatians. The terrible case of Joyce Vincent has turned that joke very, very sour. Bridget Jones was not sure of her romantic or her professional prospects: hers was the farce that actually preceded the tragedy of Vincent. Morley pieces together the story of a vibrant, attractive, intelligent and ambitious young woman, estranged from her family, taking office jobs and nursing hopes of becoming a professional singer. She entranced many of the men she met, but seemed unable to maintain a relationship. Was she always holding out for a better offer? Was she finally too proud to admit she was lonely and ask for help from those people she had left behind in search of a glamorous future in showbusiness? Maybe so. After all, laughing at the pathetic wannabes on Pop Idol was a national sport.
Again, you return to the simple facts: Didn't anybody notice? How about the smell? Well, perhaps the neighbouring population was too transient to register a complaint. Or perhaps, for various reasons, no one had any great interest in drawing official attention to themselves, or perhaps they just shrugged and put up with it, assuming that complaint was pointless. It was a non-community where no one cared, apparently, where uncaringness hung in the air. And Joyce's flat is, as it happens, near those districts of Tottenham and Wood Green hit hard by this summer's riots.
It's certainly a grim comment on the caring state. And could it be that even the most prosperous of us are welfare addicts, assuming in our hearts that the state will provide? Well, the case of Joyce Vincent is proof that the state will not provide, and it also proves that we can't be complacent about the "big society" rushing in to provide either.
Dreams of a Life is not without flaws: Joyce's sisters declined to be interviewed, and the absence of testimony from them is arguably a problem, as is the absence of a clear description from Morley of how she approached them and in what terms she was rebuffed. It's not easy to tell if, despite refusing to be interviewed on camera, they gave Morley off-the-record guidance. Perhaps they did.
However, this is still a searing prose-poem on celluloid about loneliness: the kind of loneliness that can only happen in the big city. It is a terrible vision of London as a kind of emotional wasteland, a world of single people in single flats, living quiet, unhappy lives: like Schrödinger's cat, they could as well be alive or dead. A morbid thought is bound to creep into the mind of anyone watching this film: how many more Joyce Vincents are out there, alone, unloved and unremembered?
Dreams of a Life is a painful film, a Christmas film with no feelgood message, but one which I think would in fact have interested Charles Dickens. Watching it is an almost claustrophobic experience, but a very powerful and moving one.
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