Dreams of a Life
By Joyce Glasser - 19/12/2011
British filmmaker (writer/director) Carol Morley burst on the scene at the turn of the millennium with her semi-autobiographical documentary, The Alcohol Years, a portrait of self-destructive youth that, for many of Morley’s generation, captured the essence of Manchester in the 1980s. Eleven years later, her second feature documentary, Dreams of a Life, captures the essence of London in the Noughties; a London that Boris Johnson and Seb Coe might not wish to acknowledge. While many condemn our Big Brother Society, the constant invasions on our privacy by commercial firms and the intrusive CCTV cameras that record the city’s life, the fact remains that a once popular, pretty and vibrant 38-year-old woman, Joyce Vincent, lay dead in her seedy flat for three years before anyone noticed.
Like the Alcohol Years, Morley stretches the boundaries of the biographical documentary by a sometimes frustrating, but surely intentional, refusal to answer questions, make judgments, or follow the expected forensic tracks. The past and present are merged by a continual resurgence of impressionistic images with a carefully chosen soundtrack. Here, Morley uses the music that Joyce – who is seen recording a demo tape for an unrealised singing career–listened to. Unnecessarily, but no doubt due to a lack of visuals, actresses are employed to re-enact what we are told by interviewees. Over and over we see the vibrant, sexy Joyce age 23 contrasted with the lonely woman approaching 40, wrapping Christmas presents in 2003, just seconds before she died from what might have been asthma. 
Even after a few rounds of talking heads, where former boyfriends and female office colleagues comment on her beauty, immaculate dress style and failure to commit, what we know is a lot less than what we want to know. Joyce’s beloved mother died when she was 11 and some suspect that her Caribbean father abused her, resulting in her inability to form lasting relationships. She seems to have left school at 16 and worked as support staff in the city, but her last job – that anyone knows of – was cleaning offices. Because of her appearance and the way she spoke (her mother gave her elocution lessons), Joyce passed as respectable middle class.
In the production notes, Morley confirms that she located Joyce’s family and even met one of her four sisters, but they all insisted on anonymity. This is unfortunate, and Morley’s failure to mention it even more so; as it is precisely the people in her life -- whether or not they appear on camera – who are under the spot light. Joyce didn’t make it easy for people to care about her and disappeared from people’s lives as easily as she appeared in them, but for all four sisters to show no curiosity as to her whereabouts is astonishing. The gifts Joyce was wrapping when she died must have been intended for someone, but Morley never speculates for whom. And where were the tax man, the council, the phone and water companies or the neighbours?
Morley’s film is less about Joyce Vincent than about the phoniness of this Age of Communication. She never lets us forget that Joyce’s television, that symbol of mass communication, remained on for three years as its owner became ill, died, and turned into a skeleton in front of it.