{"id":1190,"date":"2011-12-21T22:30:26","date_gmt":"2011-12-21T21:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1190"},"modified":"2016-01-24T18:47:06","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T17:47:06","slug":"dreams-of-a-life-dir-carol-morley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1190","title":{"rendered":"<em>Dreams of a Life<\/em> (2011),  dir. Carol Morley"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Dreams of a Life<\/em> is a mesmerising film. <span> <\/span>It\u2019s beautiful photography seems almost to belong to a different film, and it\u2019s exquisite pacing and narrative arc show Carol Morley to have an iron control over her film. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>In part, the film comprises a series of talking heads of the \u2018friends\u2019 of Joyce Vincent, whose body was discovered three years after her death.<span> <\/span>She had died with the TV on and surrounded by Christmas presents that she was in the process of wrapping.<span> <\/span>Joyce&#8217;s friends are photographed, backlit against the kind of cloth that would be found in a professional photographers. <span> <\/span>Their heads are, to a person, very beautiful, and such slight artificiality is at one with their comments on a woman that they had all known, but \u2018given up\u2019 for at least the three years that it took to find her body. <span> <\/span>Unsurprisingly too, there are a range of contradictions in their reporting of this ultimately enigmatic woman. <span> <\/span>For a number of them, Joyce was possessed of a wonderful voice which, combined with her wonderful figure and good looks should have offered her a career in pop-music, which she may have craved. But her record producer boyfriend states that she couldn\u2019t sing and had to stay his side of the glass panel. <span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Interleaved with the talking heads are a series of reconstructions of scenes from Joyce Vincent\u2019s life in which she is played by Zawe Ashton. <span> <\/span>There is a lot of Joyce walking round West London, or being ill in various places including a women\u2019s refuge. <span> <\/span>And scenes from the imagined final moments of her life.<span> <\/span>There is also a very, very powerful reconstruction of the clearing and cleaning of her flat after the removal of her body. <span> <\/span>All of which are beautifully framed.<span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Just as well done, to my mind, and equally as powerful, is the film that the director shows of her own board of notes, postits and a time-line of the events of Joyce Vincent\u2019s life. <span> <\/span>On here, the audience gets glimpses of the people that Morley could not interview;<span> <\/span>Joyce\u2019s three elder sisters, an enigmatic \u2018Polish boyfriend\u2019. <span> <\/span>And the embargoed notes from the police inquiry and the women\u2019s refuge that Morley could not get access to, even with a Freedom of Information enquiry. <span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>What came across to me most powerfully was the way in which even those who claimed to have loved her most seemed never to have fully engaged with her. <span> <\/span>There was no sense that these people had asked her any questions about herself, her life, about anything really. Yes, this was a portrait of society at its most atomised;<span> <\/span>and, yes, people do lay undiscovered after their deaths. <span> <\/span>But mostly this entrancing film was a portrait of a society in which people seemed unable to ask the right questions, or, even if they did, to listen to the answers.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dreams of a Life is a mesmerising film. It\u2019s beautiful photography seems almost to belong to a different film, and it\u2019s exquisite pacing and narrative arc show Carol Morley to have an iron control over her film. In part, the film comprises a series of talking heads of the \u2018friends\u2019 of Joyce Vincent, whose body [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[14,283],"tags":[67,98],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Dreams of a Life (2011), dir. 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