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    Voices From A Locked Room (Blog Review) Archived Message

    Posted by Joan aka HazelP on July 24, 2011, 11:33 am

    http://pppatty.blogspot.com/2011/07/serendipity.html

    Sunday, 24 July 2011
    Serendipity
    If my viewing life was not so blessed with occasional happy surprises, I doubt I would be so obsessive at viewing nearly everything that comes my way nor being as prepared to grant even the most dubious offering an even break. While this results in my seeing a lot of dreck -- to put no finer point upon it, the occasional gem is found glittering amongst the morass.

    Voices from a Locked Room (1995), aka Voices: I knew absolutely nothing about this movie and must assume that while not made for television, it never received any sort of distribution in the cinema. It is a absolutely riveting biopic of the pseudonymous, modern progressive British composer Peter Warlock -- if one ignores the fact that the story being told bears little resemblance to the realities of his own short life. The movie is set in a faithfully rendered London of 1930; Jeremy Northam plays a respected newspaper music critic, Philip Heseltine, whose bête noir is what he considers the derivative or 'stolen' output of the reclusive, yet fashionable, composer. It might be considered a 'spoiler' to reveal the twist, although the conclusion soon becomes apparent to the viewer, but Heseltine and Warlock are one and the same person; the protagonist's increasingly violent and irrational behaviour is the product of a bi-polar, disturbed mind. Heseltine is a wealthy man about town, courting a talented American night-club singer -- a strong role for Tushka Bergen, while Warlock works from a Battersea slum and warns her against the hated critic. They function as two discreet, yet obviously dependent personalities, and each of them indulges in life-threatening ploys against the other. There is some cockamamie backstory that Heseltine was traumatised as a child when his wicked stepfather set his grand piano alight -- I bet! At any rate, Northam is absolutely brilliant at playing these Jekyll and Hyde characters at war within himself.

    Although the film is based on a novel, it is barely factual and a great deal of poetic license has been taken in bringing the source material to the screen. The only fact that is inarguable is that Warlock/Heseltine died in mysterious circumstances in his gas-filled flat at the age of 34. However the story of the self-loathing critic and the tortured genius existing in a single body has gifted Northam with an actor's tour-de-force that deserves to be rescued from its satellite graveyard.

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