Dreams of a Life

Elusively private

But what of those that draw a blank in the archive – and in the collective memory bank? Carol Morley’s unnerving tragedy Dreams of a life sleuths the case of Joyce Carol Vincent, a popular woman who – in 2003, aged 38 – died in her flat overlooking the WoodGreen shopping City, with the TV on. her body was only discovered three years later. how could this happen? Where were her friends, neighbour’s, the council etc? In passing, Morley’s film paints an unflattering picture of broken civic ties – her camera repeatedlypans from the shopping centre’s neon lodestar to the unloved single -storey flat beside it – but the riddle wrapped in mystery is Joyce herself, a friendly, sexy but elusively private chameleon of a woman wo was the acme of an atomised individual. Morley advertised to find may of her interviewees – Joyce’s former friends, boyfriends and colleagues – and converses with them across the camera, often telling them her own investigative findings, as well as receiving their testimonies. If you want documentry spontaneity, it’s certainly here (The talking heads are also edited with a beautiful rhythm.) But Morley also directs eerie enactments, both of the eventual discovery of Joyce’s body in her (real?) cobwebbed flat and, more imaginatively, of scenes from her life using a child and adult actor -surrogates for a cipher. Their images perpetually fill the vacancy in our comprehension of Joyce’s life; they’re seductive like fiction, but though we mnay resist, that leaves us back facing the void of a life that slipped through people’s fingers.