When Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) and David White (Josh O’Connor) meet over the top of apiano in aBoston college bar, the spark between them is instant. One is atalented vocal student, the other acomposition major preoccupied with recording and cataloguing the folk music of rural communities. Their shared passion for song is what brings them into each other’s orbit, and the onset of the First World War is what cruelly divides them for the firsttime.
While David goes off to fight, Lionel returns to his family’s farm in Kentucky, where the work is hard and honest. By the time they meet again, they’re both alittle worse for wear. Asojourn to rural Maine to continue David’s folk recording project provides both with anew sense of purpose and rekindles their tentative romance, but like all great ballads, there’s tragedy on the horizon.
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When The History of Sound was announced in 2021 it set the internet ablaze, with many excited about the prospect of atender gay romance starring two of the hottest young actors in the industry – but the resulting film is perhaps more restrained and delicate, sparing in its sexual content, for better or worse. The film is more concerned with how this pivotal moment in Lionel’s life changed everything about the person he would become.
O’Connor, seemingly incapable of delivering abad performance, is wonderful and tragic as David, charismatic and glib and fantastically handsome. Who wouldn’t fall in love with him or the way his tired smile never seems to reach his eyes? Mescal opposite is perhaps alittle lost as Lionel, despite his best efforts to deliver aserviceable American accent and the charming chemistry between them. There’s just something alittle too interior about his performance – it’s difficult to buy that his relationship with David really is as significant as the film wants us to believe it is. But to his credit, his singing sequences are quite beautiful, as are O’Connor’s, and the folk soundtrack evokes Inside Llewyn Davis in its soulfulness.
While comparisons with Brokeback Mountain are inevitable among those with alimited understanding of queer cinema, The History of Sound has far more in common with Merchant Ivory – particularly The Remains of the Day or Maurice – in its pervasive melancholy and sense of profound regret at past inertia. It’s not repression that powers the film, but the tragedy of understanding something far too late to chase it. Its buttoned-up nature might frustrate those hoping for amore salacious story, but the director Oliver Hermanus and writer Ben Shattuck (adapting his own short story of the same name) have produced aunique and moving romance for those willing to listen.