I gather that the film is based on Coker. Does this change one’s view of the film ? Not at all, except that it helps to explain its depth and its reality, the nuances of the English class system, which so appealed to Coker, his love of double-breasted suits and East Anglia. One feels without knowing it that the film is based on long buried and autobiographical pain and on some truth about the complexities of life and how they transmogrify into art, even without knowing the original character and how he might have inspired it. Anthony’s voice in the film was apparently based on a recording of the original. I would be interested in hearing it.
i didn’t think Tom Burke’s voice was much like his …
I agree, also Nick was more obviously handsome, at least in his less roué days. Charles
As a close friend of Nick Coker from Cambridge days and subsequently, though not in touch in the last few years of his life, I do find it disturbing that this film should be based in part on someone’s rather weird view of him. Until the drugs got to him, Nick was also a warm, loving, thoughtful person, a brilliant flautist, mercurial and funny. It’s a tragic story of early promise, a seeming inability to transition to fully adult life, drugs and early death, and I still feel sad about it.
Dear Teresa, As a friend of Nick’s too, I didn’t find the film warped and felt it conveyed much of his charm, as well as his mystery, alongside the tragedy of his later decline from his charmed (and charming) youth. Charles