The Alcohol Years

In the early eighties, English filmmaker Carol Morley led a wild and wanton life. Every night she went out, every night she got drunk and preferably spent every night with a different bedfellow; man or woman, she did not care.Fifteen years later, she places an ad with the request to everyone who knew her between 1982 and 1987 to get in touch. Her personal memory of those extraordinary days in Manchester fails her and she is looking for eyewitnesses. A number of friends and acquaintances appear in front of the camera to talk about Morley’s past.The characterisations vary from disturbed alcoholic to freaked-out nymphomaniac.THE ALCOHOL YEARS is an uncommonly candid portrait, in which the maker does not say a word. She does appear on interjected archive footage and photographs. ‘That small girl with the pretty face and the large breasts,’ one of her ex-boyfriends says. Not everyone is equally pleased to see her again. Still, she seems to have left an indelible impression on most of them.