Monthly Archives: September 2020

  • Dreams of a Life

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Carol Morley (2011)

    Joyce Carol Vincent was found dead in January 2006 because of unpaid rent on her bedsit in Tarleton Court, above the Wood Green shopping centre.  Housing officials arrived to repossess the flat and, getting no answer, forced their way in.  Vincent’s remains were described by the pathologist as ‘mostly skeletal’.  Although she was identified by comparing dental records with a photograph recovered from the flat, the cause of death couldn’t be established because it had occurred so long ago – circa December 2003.  Travelling on the London Underground, Carol Morley happened to read a Sun account of this grim discovery but the article contained little information about Vincent and no picture.  Morley found the story so shocking that she determined to find out more.  She placed ‘Did You Know Joyce Vincent?’ notices in newspapers and on internet sites, and on the side of a London black cab.  Through the responses she received and the further contacts they generated, Morley started to piece together Vincent’s history.  The docudrama Dreams of a Life was the eventual result.

    Morley’s request for information gives just a few biographical details about Joyce Vincent – her year and place of birth (1965, Hammersmith), her Caribbean parentage.  It’s when the film first shows photos of Joyce that you realise you’ve already made easy assumptions about who she was in order to explain her isolation.  Her face confounds these assumptions and replaces them with others, similarly facile:  once you see that Joyce was well groomed and attractive, it’s harder to understand how she can have been so alone.  And as Morley noted in a Guardian piece in October 2011 (when Dreams of a Life premiered at the London Film Festival), the subject of her film ‘didn’t fit the typical profile of someone who might die and be forgotten: she wasn’t old without family; she wasn’t a loner, or an overdosed drug addict; nor was she an isolated heavy drinker’.

    Morley combines talking head interviews with reconstructions of the discovery of Joyce’s remains and its immediate aftermath (figures in white suits and what we all now know as PPE excavate the bedsit), as well as imagined scenes from her life, in which she’s played as a child by Alix Luka-Cain and as a woman by Zawe Ashton.  Although speculative, these latter sequences usually chime with something said about Joyce by those remembering her. Morley’s interviewees don’t include members of Joyce’s family, who wished to remain anonymous.  They do include former friends and lovers, a school contemporary, work colleagues from Ernst & Young and her local MP, Lynne Featherstone.  As a piece of detective work, Dreams of a Life could have been more about the making of itself than it actually is, though Morley sometimes uses as a bridge between sequences shots of her wall of post-it notes and her jottings on a white board that connect different stages of, and people in, Joyce’s life.

    ‘Skeleton of Joyce found on sofa with telly still on’, read the Sun sub-headline.  Although how she died was necessarily uncertain, she was asthmatic and had recently spent two days in hospital for treatment of a peptic ulcer.  Both things have been suggested as possible causes of death but Joyce’s friend Alton Edwards, the Zimbabwean singer, thinks differently.  He reckons she may have been murdered – that ‘there was more to this than meets the eye’.  (Wasn’t and isn’t what meets the eye enough?)  Most of the contributors, who knew a highly sociable, ‘bubbly’ young woman, recall their disbelief on learning how she ended up but don’t resort to Edwards’ brand of speculation.  They seem to accept that Joyce’s death needn’t itself have been extraordinary (though she was unusually young) because it remained hidden from view for so extraordinarily long.

    The talking heads aren’t identified by names on the screen but the viewer soon gets to know them – especially Joyce’s chalk-and-cheese former boyfriends Martin Lister and Alistair Abrahams.  These two come to embody the disparities of Joyce’s world.  Martin is white, genial, awkwardly unprepossessing.  Several of his friends, who got to know Joyce through him, voice good-humoured surprise that she was attracted to Martin.  After they stopped being an item, she kept returning to him as a platonic friend, living in his home for several months in late 2001 and early 2002, when she suddenly moved out.  Martin isn’t alone in expressing remorse about eventually losing touch with Joyce but his evident emotional honesty gives his feelings of guilt a particular edge.

    His polar opposite is calmly self-confident, dreadlocked Alistair Abrahams (the authority of whose presence seems to demand that you refer to him, unlike Martin, by surname).  Abrahams, also originally from Zimbabwe, has had a long career in the pop industry as a tour promoter and manager.  During the two years that Joyce lived with him in the early 1990s, she made the acquaintance of the likes of Jimmy Cliff and Isaac Hayes.  Abrahams also recalls taking her to the ‘International Tribute for a Free South Africa’ concert at Wembley Stadium, two months after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.  Mandela was Abrahams’ hero but he doesn’t think Joyce felt the same way:  she was eager to attend the concert not because of Mandela’s importance as an African freedom fighter but because he was a star.  Abrahams feels she would have been just as enthusiastic about an event built around Princess Diana.  He was understandably exasperated when, after he and Joyce had been briefly separated at Wembley, she reappeared to report she’d been standing so close to Mandela that she’d spoken with him.  Her escort would have given a lot to do the same.

    Abrahams tells Morley he and Joyce were once in love but he’s dry-eyed when he says she brought her eventual solitude on herself.   Joyce may not have had the ‘typical profile of someone who might die and be forgotten’ but Morley – whether or not this was her intention – gradually constructs a picture of a person whose inclination and experiences were conducive to alienation.  The youngest of five daughters, Joyce was brought up by her elder sisters after their mother died, when she was eleven.  The girls’ father seems to have been a highly unreliable presence in their lives.  Few of those who knew the adult Joyce got to know any of her siblings.  According to several witnesses, Joyce didn’t trust people enough to open up to them.  She’s described as superficial and as someone of attenuated identity.  It’s suggested that she adopted the interests of whomever she was currently involved with as if to fill a vacuum.  The feelings about Nelson Mandela that Abrahams attributes to Joyce aren’t the only hint of an uncertain relationship with her own ethnicity – someone else thinks she’d have rather been white.  The pivotal relationship in the last years of her life seems to have been an abusive one that took her to a women’s refuge for a time.  Her work colleagues Kim Bacon and Daniel Roberts express amazement that Joyce had next to no educational qualifications.  It’s unclear how she managed to get what sounds like a responsible job in Ernst & Young’s treasury department but she left it in 2001.  Martin Lister discovered, after she’d moved out of his place the following year, that Joyce had recently been working as a hotel cleaner.

    All this makes it regrettably unsurprising that Joyce Vincent wasn’t reported missing.  She was estranged from her sisters; Kim Bacon recalls Joyce saying that her father was dead.  (If she died in December 2003, she in fact predeceased him by a matter of weeks.)  Joyce had frequently moved home in London; friends depended on her to let them know her latest address and she seems to have told no one she was living in Tarleton Court.  When she was in hospital for the peptic ulcer in November 2003, she named her bank manager as next of kin.  What’s harder to understand is that neighbours didn’t report either the smell or the sound of the television coming from her flat.  Morley doesn’t explain either of these things but the Wikipedia article on Vincent has a go:  ‘Neighbours had assumed the flat was unoccupied, and the odour of decomposing body tissue was attributed to nearby waste bins. … It was a noisy building which may explain why no one questioned the constant noise from the television …’

    At the end of her film, Morley plays footage from the video recording of the Mandela concert.  The camera shows members of the audience, one of whom is unmistakably Joyce.  In her 2011 Guardian piece Morley describes her discovery of this, after Alistair Abrahams had mentioned that his brother thought he might have seen Joyce on a televised recording of the event:

    ‘I ordered up the film of the concert … from the BFI National Archive.  I trawled through it, ever hopeful, constantly pausing when I spotted anyone remotely resembling Joyce.  After a few fruitless hours I began to prepare myself for disappointment when the programme cut from the stadium crowds to Nelson Mandela backstage, addressing the musicians who had taken part in the show.  As he ended his passionate speech they cheered in appreciation, and there was a cut to a wide shot from the rear of the room – featuring an array of backs of heads.

    And then I saw her … She turned and smiled at someone behind her.  Catching the light, her earrings gleamed.  She turned back and I panicked, I had lost her. But she turned around once more.  It was Joyce – moving and alive.  I had found her. The power of the moving image hit me, the power to resurrect. … I rewound the tape and timed Joyce’s appearance.  Four seconds. I slowed the footage down and watched. One hundred frames, hundreds of dancing pixels.  …  Joyce, who died alone in her bedsit, anonymous and seemingly forgotten, had once had her image transmitted live to millions of living rooms in the 61 countries where the show was broadcast.’

    Joyce had ambitions to be a performing artist.  As a child, she sings along to Gladys Knight’s ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ to the approving delight of her mother (Neelam Bakshi).  Alone in her flat, the adult Joyce – wearing a slinky blue dress, a hairbrush mic in her hand – mimes to Carolyn Crawford’s ‘My Smile is Just a Frown (Turned Upside Down)’.  The woman who knew Joyce at school recalls how her pop renditions in the playground held classmates spellbound but Alistair Abrahams can’t avoid laughing as he insists his ex ‘was no singer’.  Even so, it’s presumably thanks to him that Joyce made a demo tape of a song called ‘Tell Me’, which accompanies the images of the Mandela concert and the closing credits.  Yet Carol Morley’s recovery of her protagonist in sight and sound, though it might seem to deliver to the viewer the ‘real’ Joyce Vincent, has the effect of making her more tantalisingly out of reach.  This strengthens Dreams of a Life.  As a quasi-case study, it’s never less than absorbing but it’s more memorable as an unsolved mystery.

    Purely in terms of screen time, the film contains far more documentary than dramatised material but Zawe Ashton’s impressive incarnation of Joyce lifts the latter well above the level of reconstruction.  It’s a virtually silent role but Ashton is strongly expressive, especially lip-syncing the Carolyn Crawford song.  This emotional power – because it isn’t supplemented by what you expect in conventional drama:  putting a character’s feelings into spoken words, interaction with other characters, and so on – protects Joyce’s mystique.  She wouldn’t let anyone get too close to her and Morley makes effective use of a surreal device to suggest Joyce’s determination to keep it that way and her secrets intact.  We occasionally see Morley’s talking heads on the screen of the television set in the bedsit.  At one point, Joyce watches them but she’s holding the remote control.  There’s also one puzzling and poignant detail about Joyce’s death scene that is underlined near the end of the film.  Beside the sofa where she lay were a shopping bag and gift-wrapped Christmas presents.  Morley has shown Ashton’s Joyce wrapping things up, adding a shiny gift bow to one of the packages.  Now the camera lingers on them.  There are (and there really were) no gift tags.  Who were the presents for?

    12 September 2020

  • Les misérables

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ladj Ly (2019)

    There’s nothing like a major sporting triumph to bring a country together.  You can be highly dissatisfied with the state of the nation but still enjoy being on the winning side – for a few hours anyway.  Ladj Ly’s Les misérables begins on 15 July 2018, the day that France won the soccer World Cup for the second time.   In the opening sequences, a young adolescent boy called Issa (Issa Perica) is happily draped in the French tricolor and among thousands of Parisians celebrating on the Champs-Élysées.  The crowd is ethnically diverse, like the French team that beat Croatia 4-2.  Their three scorers (the first goal was a Croatian own goal) were Antoine Griezmann (of German and Portuguese descent), Paul Pogba (Guinean parents) and – as predicted by Issa to a friend – Kylian Mbappé.  The son of an Algerian mother and a Cameroonian father, Mbappé was brought up in the Paris suburb of Bondy, not far from Issa’s home in the commune of Montfermeil.  On the day of the final, Issa has one of his cheeks painted red, white and blue.  He looks very different twenty-four hours later, after being shot in the face by a police flash-ball.  At the climax to the film, the day after that, he and other residents in Montfermeil’s Les Bosquets projects, take revenge on the police patrol concerned.  In the closing shots of Les misérables one of the patrol team is pointing a gun at Issa, begging the boy not to throw the Molotov cocktail he holds in his hand.

    Like Issa, Ladj Ly, whose parents are from Mali, grew up in Montfermeil – also the location of the Thénardiers’ inn in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables from which this new film, Ly’s first feature, takes its title.  The question of whether the climactic showdown here is based on actual events is virtually superfluous:  we know violence of this kind was taking place in Parisian ghettoes as long ago as the ‘émeutes de 2005 dans les banlieues françaises’, a three-week period of riots in the suburbs of Paris (and other French cities).  These involved young people of predominantly African, North African and Arab heritage in the burning of cars and public buildings, and other acts of violence.  But the mayhem in the film definitely isn’t a dramatisation of events a couple of days after France’s World Cup win – which Ly uses to achieve a heightened contrast between national euphoria and continuing reality.  In fact, Les misérables is an expansion of the director’s 2017 short of the same name, which derived from a real incident in Montfermeil in 2008.

    On the day after the final, Stéphane Ruiz (Damien Bonnard) starts a new posting with the Paris ‘Street Crimes Unit’ (SCU).  He’s part of a team of three officers that also includes Chris (Alexis Manenti) and Gwada (Djebril Zonga).  It’s soon evident that Chris, the hard-nosed team leader, is ready to lay down the law aggressively and that the unassertive Gwada won’t argue.  The catalysing event in the plot is the theft of a lion cub from a local circus, run by Zorro (Raymond Lopez).  The thief’s identity is soon revealed when one of his friends posts an Instagram picture of Issa, who is a known juvenile delinquent, with the cub.  When the three police officers track him down, other friends of Issa try to prevent his arrest by throwing stones and other missiles.  In the ensuing confusion, Gwada first accidentally releases tear gas into his own face, then shoots a flash-ball at Issa, stunning and wounding him.  Stéphane wants to get the boy to a hospital.  Chris and (therefore) Gwada have a different priority.  They realise almost immediately that the scuffle, including the flash-ball shot, has been filmed by a drone.  Leaving Stéphane in the squad car to mind the injured Issa, they head off into a nearby apartment block in search of the drone’s owner.

    The tinderbox set-up brings to mind Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing but Les misérables isn’t a slow burn to a single explosion.  The violence is salient from an early stage and not only in the encounter that ends with Gwada’s flash-ball.  It informs Chris’s abusive language and hostile attitude.  (The shirt he wears is emblazoned, expressively, with the word Venum, the name of a combat-sportswear line.)  And violence is more upsettingly present in a sequence of physical and emotional abuse that just stops short of actual bodily harm.  The police, with Issa in tow, return the lion cub to Zorro.  The latter comments cursorily on the state of the boy’s face before putting the cub back in his cage, grabbing Issa before the police can stop him, and standing with him inside the cage of the circus’s adult lion.  The snarling animal and the terrified, weeping boy are both on the receiving end of Zorro’s cruelty.  (It’s conceivable that Ly means to liken the caged lion and lion cub, as African imports, to Paris’s citizens of African heritage.)

    Les misérables is a propulsive piece of film-making.  It quickly acquires an in-your-face momentum that Ladj Ly never loses, thanks to the storyline, the rapidly successive action sequences, a pulsing score (by the Pink Noise duo of Marco Casanova and Kim Chapiron) and Flora Volpelière’s brilliant editing.  It should be said the cutting is just as, though differently, impressive in the rare relatively quiet scenes – especially the police officers’ return to their homes at the end of their manic Monday, and the meeting that evening of Stéphane and Gwada in a bar.  A short domestic scene between the latter and his mother (Mousba Harb) – he in SCU uniform, she in African costume – is particularly eloquent.

    Ly and his cinematographer Julien Poupard create some powerful images and effects.  A high-altitude shot isn’t, as it sometimes seems to be in a film, a God’s-eye view of events – and God’s eye because the director is displaying their omnipotence.  In Les misérables, the view from above is that of the drone owner, Buzz (Al-Hassan Ly), another teenage boy, from the top of the tower block which is the recurring focus of the SCU investigations and the site of the final confrontation.  The prelude to that confrontation is a deceptively light-hearted attack on the squad car by kids from the block with water pistols.  The World Cup’s feelgood effect rapidly vanishes but reminders of it don’t quite disappear, thanks to the blue French football shirt worn throughout by a Mr Big of Montfermeil – the self-styled Mayor of the locality (‘Le Maire’ is printed on the back of the shirt).  The successive transformations of Issa’s face are remarkable.  It’s zombie-like in the aftermath of his injury and the episode in the lion’s cage.  In the finale, Issa’s face is once again ardently animated – an animation very different from the delight he radiated after the football match.

    The film’s exceptional dynamism obscures a simplistic screenplay (by Ly, Alexis Manenti and Giordano Gederlini).  The police officers, well though all three are played, are schematically defined:  Stéphane and Chris are decidedly good cop/bad cop.  The latter is presented as more or less psychopathic, except in a snatch of his harassed home life that briefly normalises him.  While he and Gwada are hunting Buzz, Stéphane disobeys orders by driving off in the squad car to get medication for Issa from a pharmacy.  In the event, it’s Stéphane who gets hold of the drone’s memory card and who, when they meet in the bar, hands it over to Gwada – along with the responsibility to decide whether to own up to injuring Issa.  Gwada is trapped in a racial dilemma too – a black man working for an organisation perceived as inimical to the non-white denizens of Les Bosquets.  (It’s essential to Ly’s scheme that Gwada is the one who wounds Issa.)  Morality play-like distinctions between the principals are mirrored in supporting characters:  on the one hand, the unscrupulous Mayor (Steve Tientcheu), who is less concerned with representing his community than with consolidating his own power within it; on the other, the devout Muslim Salah (Almamy Kanouté), an ex-convict who now runs a Montfermeil kebab house.

    The pandemonium of the climax leads to the final face-off between Issa and Stéphane in the tower block stairwell.  The camera’s movement to and fro between them is extended (perhaps over-extended).  It’s a mutual and symbolic point-of-no-return that Ly leaves unresolved, as if asking the French political and civic authorities, ‘So how do you want this to turn out?’  The screen fades to black and a quote from Hugo’s Les misérables – ‘There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators’.  The film draws its power from a kinetic style and from the viewer’s awareness that it’s a warning about an urgent, real-life socio-cultural crisis.  It’s no surprise to read (on Wikipedia) that President Macron, on seeing Ly’s film, ‘asked the government to find ideas and act to improve living conditions in the banlieues’, a view echoed by prominent politicians of other parties.  In achieving this level of public reaction, Ladj Ly has achieved what he surely set out to achieve (not to mention the various awards his film has won).  But Les misérables is short on insight and characterisation.  Despite its unarguable impact, it’s a shallow piece of dramatic cinema.

    7 September 2020

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