The theme of dark festive docu-downers continues with Dreams of a Life, a 2011 film from director Carol Morley. This one tells the story of 38-year-old Londoner Joyce Vincent who died in her flat above a shopping precinct in 2003, though her remains were not discovered until more than three years later lying next to a pile of unopened Christmas presents. Her heating and TV were still on and nobody had noticed the woman was missing. This tragic tale explores how such an ebullient, intelligent, once-popular woman could end up falling through the cracks and being completely forgotten about.
I feel quite cheated by this one as it features on many lists of ‘best Christmas documentaries’, yet as I continue to watch, I realise the festive angle is a very flimsy one. Yes, poor Joyce was found next to a pile of presents, allowing cops to estimate her time of death but the Christmas aspect isn’t explored much beyond that. Still, it’s a captivating, if slight, documentary.
Joyce’s sad and bleak tale is brought to life via a great performance from Zawe Ashton in dramatic reconstruction scenes, capturing the woman’s carefree spirit, soul and vivaciousness. Numerous talking head interviews with old friends and lovers paint a powerful picture of how captivating, cool and well-regarded Joyce was but, frustratingly, offer precious little explanation about what led to her isolation and subsequent lonely death at Christmas.
Though Morley spins an interesting story with the material she has, I get the impression that a lot of information is missing here. We’re told that Joyce’s family declined to take part in the project, leaving us with what feels like a half-finished portrait of a life. How could your own father and four sisters not notice you’d been missing for over one thousand days? At her death, why was her next of kin listed as her bank manager? The film can’t tell us. We’ve all probably got old friends we’ve lost contact with and the film’s big problem is that nobody interviewed , save for one ex-boyfriend, can really tell us much about what Joyce was like in her final years. It’s infuriating, feeling like a lot of build up with no payoff. It’s not a film about ‘what happened’ but about how sad it was that it did.
We get the vague image of Joyce as being a bit of a heartbreaker, an interesting woman who took elocution lessons as a child, dabbled as a singer, hung out with some ‘80s pop stars and even met Nelson Mandela. She’s painted as a nomad, drifting around London shedding lives and entire groups of friends like a snake sheds its skin, until something goes horribly wrong. The film also tries to explore how the electric company, her neighbours, landlord, the council - none of these people realised Joyce was gone, despite many months of unpaid bills and unanswered correspondence. But again, maddeningly, the filmmakers didn’t seem to score interviews with any of these parties, leaving so many questions unanswered.
As Joyce’s story unfolds, I find myself thinking it’s a depressing commentary on the state of modern society that we’re apparently just not that ‘neighbourly’ anymore. Though I’m pleased that many of my old friendships can nowadays be maintained by social media and mobile phones, I soberly discern that the idea of something like Joyce’s sad, isolated demise doesn’t seem all that surprising. I realise I don’t know the names of a whole bunch of people I’ve lived across the road from for six years. If something happened to them, would I even notice they were gone? It’s gut-wrenching that Christmas - so often thought of as a time for sharing love and of people coming together - for this woman turned out to be so lamentably empty. The impassioned words of Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe echo in my ears and I understand that I simply must make more of an effort to look out for my neighbours.
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