Dreams of A Life
Directed by Carol Morley
with Zawe Ashton, Neelam Bakshi and Lee Colley
2011
Dreams of A Life revealed itself to be less chilling and hypnotizing than its trailer had suggested.
All that was left of Joyce Vincent when she was found in her apartment, three years after her death, was a skeleton in front of the television. Although the story appeared in many newspapers little was discovered about the circumstances of the woman's death or even her identity. After five years of research, tracing down friends and family members, piecing together evidences and memories, director Carol Morley has compiled a half-documentary, half-dramatized portrait of Joyce Vincent.
The feature alternates shots of interviewed friends and acquaintances (strangely enough no names or details of the kind of tie they had with Joyce are given), with (recreated?) scenes of the drastic cleaning of the apartment after the finding and dramatized scenes from Joyce’s life. The movie starts with a striking sequence: Joyce’s friends are given a copy of newspaper presenting the news of her finding and for the first time they this is the Joyce they have known. From there, Morley uses their memories to reconstruct in images her story: her childhood, her time at school, her various boyfriends, her assumed abuse and final fall into isolation.
The editing of the interviews does a good job in bringing out the contradictions between different accounts, letting the viewer to deal with the issue of the inevitable biased knowledge one has of others. The soundtrack song ‘My Smile is Just a Frown’, on which actress Zowe Ashton, playing Joyce, gives a remarkable performance, seems to perfectly sum up the point of the documentary: behind the solar and friendly Joyce there was a suffering person, who finally chose isolation for herself. This also raises the question of responsibility when it comes down to the interviewed people: why did they not realise?
At first, the reconstructed dramatized scenes of the movie help creating a charming, yet mysterious representation of Joyce Vincent. At length, however, they end up losing their power, blatantly satisfying the viewer's thirst for images which, had it been left yielding, would have created a more intense, tantalizing mental image of the absent character. The only two media records of Joyce found by the director – a recorded tape and the last scene – were powerful enough to have stood alone in the feature. They also retrospectively made the acted scenes look like an easy way out of the lack of firm information.
One wonders why Morley decided to dedicate a good half of the feature to these acted scenes, rather than recounting her own, personal, almost obsessive research on Joyce's life and personality. From time to time, the camera swipes over a great amount of notes, documents and records, which are nevertheless never explicitly integrated into the feature. They sometimes seem to carry more information than what is given in the feature, leaving the viewer wondering why nothing is made out of them.
Dreams of A Life is at its best in its real documentary moments, but the dramatized part of it ends up having the upper hand on the viewer’s mind. What one is left with, at the end of the feature, is a vague idea of who Joyce Vincent might have been. This idea, however, seems to be less one’s own, than Morley’s. I wish I could have left the movie mulling over what I just listened to. Instead, images of a team of hygiene service cleaning Joyce’s apartment kept sweeping into my mind.
fiamma
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