In 2006 bailiffs broke into a Wood Green bedsit to find the decomposed body of 38-year old Joyce Carol Vincent. An investigation revealed that the body had been there for three years, with the television still running. Carol Morley’s documentary attempts to piece together how Joyce could have disappeared from public life, and why friends and family failed to contact her. The result is a moving work that combines straightforward interviews with reconstructions of Joyce’s life and childhood that attempt to uncover both her personality and the events that led to her tragic death.
Zawe Ashton plays the adult Joyce, with sequences covering her relationships in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while Morley scans back to partial recollections of her childhood in Hammersmith. With Joyce’s family not agreeing to take part, much of her life is narrated by former partners, housemates and colleagues. With varying degrees of disbelief and emotion, they struggle to reconcile a lively, if drifting personality, with her tragic death.
While some of these interviews suffer from repetition, it also acknowledges the guess-work that went into the investigation, with Morley frequently cutting to stacks of notes and possible connections. Riding through the documentary however is both a strong sense of the tragedy of Joyce’s life, and the many gaps and inconsistencies of her personality. In this way, the dramatised sequences work best when imagining the claustrophobia and loneliness of Joyce’s final hours, while also providing scenes of light relief from earlier periods of her life.
Dreams of a Life stands as one of the most significant British documentaries of the year, with a sense of craft that reflects both Morley’s rigorous research and efforts to keep the momentum and depth of Joyce’s life-story going. Helped by an excellent, virtually dialogue-free performance by Ashton, and some judicious splicing of real recordings, photos and footage of Joyce, the documentary is an intimate, but compelling warning of the dangers of losing touch with friends.





