The false notes are rare in the romance “The History of Sound” by director Oliver Hermanus, written by Ben Shattuck of his own news on love men, together and apart, the First World War and its consequences. But for a queer love story with two of the hottest actors, from that moment – Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor – “The history of sound” almost perverse your expectations on what a gay romance could be.
The grandiose and radical emotional gestures towards the repression and the latent desire of something like “Brokeback Mountain” are nowhere here, Hermanus rather following the Lonesome Lionel (mescal) in the hidden corners of America and finally in Europe for a large part of this movie in melancholic mood.
Mescal and O’Connor play music students from the Boston Conservatory who meet in 1917, have been spent episodes of winding time but limited with each other over the years, and on the way to the elegant conclusion of the film. While “The History of Sound” suffers from certain problems of stimulation and detours which arise as dead ends, following the Lionel path as a grass ethnomusicologist collecting songs and sounds to record on cylinders, it is a nice film capable of injuring and haunting you.
It is also a lively window on the big screen for Mescal. The Irish escape “normal people” and the best nomine of actor Oscar, the best actor, seizes the opportunity of discreet emotions which are far from the swords and sandals of his latest film and his franchise beginnings, “Gladiator II”.
“My father said that it was a gift from God that I could see music,” said the older Lionel, played by a melancholic Chris Cooper in 1980. “My father would play B Minor, and my mouth would become bitter.” It has been revealed that Lionel has a kind of Nabokovian synesthesia that transforms his ear for sound and music into a kaleidoscope of feeling and mental processes.
We met a very young Lionel in Kentucky in 1910 before being transported to Boston in 1917, where Lionel’s life course changed when he approaches David (O’Connor), who laughed on the piano in a smoked bar. They will sleep together in one of the film’s film’s heads up – I would not call none of the screens of love in the “History of Sound” sex scenes, in addition to a scene involving the subsequent relationship of Lionel with a woman (Emma Canning). “The history of sound” never goes out and says: “These men are gay!”
Although this does not mean that Hermanus’ film – closer to the portrait of the South African Director of apartheid, “Moffie”, that his Oscar offer in 2022, “living” – does not concern queer suffering. The project threatens the taciturn romance of Lionel and David, while Shattuck’s script depends more on gestures and exchanges than declarations of literal feeling, and at the same time the trauma of war and existential uncertainty about his sexuality and his desires end up afflict David. More than, perhaps, they make Lionel. “I don’t worry,” said Lionel at some point. “I admire you,” says David.
The two men finally embarked on an impromptu journey through the woods of Maine to collect songs from the American heritage sung by the local population, a kind of self-buried academic mission whose objectives and objectives that they are not sure. But that gives Lionel and David time to pass together, in the arms of each other naked in a tent, on a handful of nights and weeks, far from the rest of the world. “The story of the sound” be careful not to reveal too early or too explicitly to what extent David and Lionel feel for each other, although a Trepidated departure in a station tells you what you need to know: “See you next summer?” “Of course.” Lionel is shaking in David’s farewells to adopt what could be the last time they have seen each other. At least for a while. These are the moments when the extremely talented measurement like Lionel, withdrawn but never holding, pierces the screen.
The script and the story of Shattuck follow more intimately Lionel during his own expedition to a sentimental education. In recent years, an established music teacher, he seems to have had a kind of difficult relationship or connection with a European protégé while teaching in sparkling and summer Italy, although the closest he can get some other than David is his girlfriend Clarissa (Canning, in a short but clear performance), a musician who wants Lionel to meet his parents. Clarissa’s mother warns him to leave him, because Lionel seems to radiate only sadness and a secret inside, David has probably never been in his mind over the years. (Director of photography Alexander Dynamo captures the chapter of Lionel in Europe with all the tactile feeling of a film by Luca Guadagnino, where the moments that cross the American environment adopt a more silent palette.)
O’Connor obtains less a recognizable emotional arch with which to work, although it is because “the history of sound” shows us only David through the eyes of Lionel, his memories, the rare and trembling moments of the assembly they have. The composer Oliver Coates, who, by coincidence, also provided ethereal music and with regret for “Afterrsun”, writes an original folk partition for this film which is held alone, with Mescal which also makes its own song and evoking an accent of Kentucky which is both stain and temporarily shy.
All the “history of the history of sound” do not reach the same emotional assurance of the first, while the path of Lionel goes and expands even by looking at David as the one he could not contain within his reach. This is partly due to the external social forces which demand that their love be kept private, behind closed doors or the canvases of a tent, but Hermanus and Shattuck are not interested in accumulating in this context, which has already been explored in many other more directly films. And I speak on behalf of Queer public members such as me when I say that we are, at this stage, on him anyway as a narrative index.
“The history of sound” is as plaintive and Lilting as a piano note in a minor key, never wallowed in its own misery but always eager to explore the psychic sensations, the remanence and the wreck of a significant connection. If the film lacks warmth, it is because Hermanus undertakes to do what is definitely not a great swelling gay romance. The emotions flood and struck hard, however, in a last chapter in which Lionel meets David’s possible woman, beautiful (Hadley Robinson, who gives a moving monologue), who is agitated and desperate for the company and hopes that Lionel will remain a little longer. There is a photo of a cigarette to burn alone in an empty cuisine that embodies the patient look of Hermanus, never in a hurry to move things (like things like the course of love) for the good of narrative impetus.
When the adult lionel (Cooper) adult of the elderly (Cooper) says that he was “never happier than when collecting songs”, what he means is that he was never happier than during the moments he spent with David. He just can’t go out and say that, forced to live in a closet that “the history of sound” does not identify or speak, and the film is better for that. The soundtrack takes a hairpin bend when the post-punk epic ballad of Joy Division “atmosphere” arises, a shocking confrontation against folk songs before, songs that almost evoke Arthur Russell, the sound of a single man in the woods with his thoughts, ruminating on his desires, where everything went wrong or found himself in the woods.
“Do not move away in silence,” sings Ian Curtis of Joy Division. Lionel ends up leaving in silence, but he is haunted by the sounds and impressions of a romance that was anything but.
Grade: B
“The History of Sound” was presented at first at the 2025 Cannes Festival. Mubi released the film later this year.
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