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
