Dreams of a Life: Film Review
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I’ll be honest: this is a movie I know that almost none of you reading this will ever watch. It isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster, doesn’t star any big marquee names, is a British docudrama, and has nothing to do with a Marvel comic book superhero. The fact that it’s also about a young black woman also means it has the cards stacked against it.
All of which is a shame. Dreams of a Life is a hauntingly poetic movie which deserves (in fact, demands) to be seen by everyone on Earth. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but really, it isn’t.
Forget the qualifiers of race, gender, and nationality. Forget the fact that at the core of the film is a story that makes you cringe and cry at the same time. Forget the fact that it’s a movie, actually. This is a story that I think everyone that has ever existed and ever dreamt about anything has feared would happen to them: that they might vanish one day and nobody would notice. Not for a day, a month, or a year. Or maybe even longer.
The truly horrific part is that this movie is based on a true story: a 38-year-old black woman named Joyce Vincent (Zawe Ashton) goes missing one day and nobody finds her for three years, despite the fact that she was found in her apartment which was located above a busy shopping center, untouched and unmoved. She had spirit, talent, and vitality. And beauty. Lots of it. How, then, could no one have sought her out for so long?
The movie tells the story of Joyce with part reenactment and part documentary style interviews with those who knew and loved her. The thing that will amaze you most of all is how the movie paints life as utterly fleeting - so fleeting, perhaps, that you are left wondering if we are anything more than a dusting of carbon and stardust whose legacy is really just an imprint in the twilight of nothingness. This is existential cinema at its most bold and beautiful.
If you’re lucky enough to have a theater nearby that is playing this hidden gem of a movie, run to see it. You won’t be the same after.