UK | 2011 | Directed by Carol Morley
Logline: A documentary that attempts to find the truths behind the mysterious life and death of Joyce Vincent, a woman who perished in her bedsit and wasn’t discovered for three years.
Filmmaker Carol Morley (the younger sister of veteran English music journalist Paul Morley) has made an extraordinary documentary; an account of a lost soul, a celebration of a life, a lament for the loss of communication, an indictment on the breakdown of modern society, where someone like Joyce Vincent can vanish and no one notices. Of course people go missing everyday, thousands do, and many of them are never found, but Joyce’s story feels different.
In 2006 housing estate officials broke into a bedsit above a busy London street where Joyce Vincent lived. She owed two-and-half thousand pounds in rent. They found her skeleton lying against her sofa, the television still on. She had been dead for nearly three years. She was 38 years old.
Carol Morley read about the discovery in one of the daily newspapers. It provoked morbid fascination, but it was a story that demanded to be told. Morley delved deeper and deeper into the shadows of Joyce Vincent’s life, her investigation becoming obsessive. There had been few details, not even a photograph of Joyce, in the newspaper, so Morley had a banner and photo put on the sides of buses that said in large letters “Did you know Joyce Carol Vincent?”
Eventually Joyce’s past began to emerge; in particular an unassuming ex-boyfriend, Martin, who described her as a vivacious, attractive, intelligent woman of Caribbean descent, who always dressed immaculately and was often the centre of attention. But this radiant exterior masked a dark interior, a woman who had come from a broken family, who harboured secrets.
The bigger picture Dreams of a Life paints is one of extreme loneliness, of being isolated and truly alone. Despite Joyce’s seemingly middle-class upbringing, her ability to meld effortlessly into whatever social situation required, her charm and exotic allure, her smart wiles, in the last few years of her life, things changed irrevocably. It seems her relationships took a turn for the worse, and she had ended up in a tiny bedsit with an apparent abdominal ailment.
Did she succumb to her illness? The rank odour of death was blamed on rubbish bins directly below the flat. Why had it taken so long for the housing estate to deal with her outstanding rent? Why on earth was the television still on? Had depression overwhelmed her? Pathology could not determine a cause of death. There are only acquaintances’ and colleagues’ memories, yet it is most curious and troubling that her three sisters refused to be involved with the documentary, not even supplying Morley with any photographs, and the two most recent boyfriends never came forward during Carol’s personal inquest.
The doco recreates Joyce’s last hours, as speculated by the filmmaker, with actor Zawe Ashton portraying Joyce, without dialogue. At once an utterly compelling, but contentious look at how no one really knows anything about anyone, how all relationships are ultimately superficial. It is also a damning indictment at how modern civilisation is crumbling, how, with savage irony, in the age of a communication revolution (keeping in mind Joyce died before online social networking exploded) someone as “memorable” as Joyce Carol Vincent can slip between the tracks and her disappearance not noticed for years.
Regardless of the darker, less penetrable corners of this mystery, Dreams of a Life burns deep into the soul, haunting and overwhelmingly sad, but superbly realised documentary filmmaking.