Fire and Ash starring Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña, The History of Sound starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor

FILM
History of Sound ★★★½
(E) 128 minutes

It would be unwise to expect too much original history from Oliver Hermanus. History of Sound – this has a lot to do, if not little, with the expeditions of pioneering US musicologists John and Alan Lomax. In the 1930s, the duo toured the southern United States by car, recording their informants’ folk and blues songs on the thick phonograph they brought with them.

The Lomaxes were a father-son team, but Hermanus and screenwriter Ben Shattuck used a similar expedition as the basis for a fictional tearjerker focused on the love affair between two young men, adapted from Shattuck’s short story of the same name.

They have similar liberties with place and time, and begin their story at the Boston Conservatory in 1917; Here Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal), a musical prodigy from rural Kentucky, meets David White (Josh O’Connor), a fellow student from a wealthier family.

The two are attracted to the folk music genre that Lionel grew up with, and when they soon return to David’s apartment, they discover they have other things in common.

Everything that develops between them is interrupted by the First World War. But a year or two later they join forces once again when David invites Lionel on a department-funded research trip to collect songs.

This working holiday is a romantic paradise, not that the shadows are visible, at least in the memory of the film’s narrator, Lionel: the songs are often mournful, the locals are not always friendly, and David himself, for all his charm, is in some ways difficult to pin down or even fully trust.

When they parted on vague terms at the end of the summer, the film was still less than halfway done. But what follows is, by design, a long taper.

Escaping from his emotionally demanding mother (Molly White), Lionel travels first to Italy and then to England, where he makes a doting upper-class girlfriend (Hadley Robinson). Meanwhile, David becomes disabled, leaving Lionel’s letters unanswered.

Both in subject and structure History of Sound He remembers Ang Lee was once angrily discussed Brokeback Mountain (now widely and rightly regarded as a modern classic). But this isn’t exactly the same kind of full-bodied love story. Everything is seen from Lionel’s point of view, allowing us to intuit what we can expect from David’s side of the story, such as O’Connor’s Mona Lisa smile and the way she holds the cigarette without moving.

As they travel together, their physical relationship seems almost casual, a natural accompaniment to the scientific enterprise that preoccupies them by day, and though the film deals with forms of prejudice, direct and otherwise, the primary force driving them has little to do with homophobia, even if it is of the internalized kind.

Still, this is a film about oppression, locked in Mescal’s characteristically gentle, unempathetic presence (though O’Connor lingers more strongly in the mind in the smaller role). The filmmaking can feel under pressure in itself, as if Hermanus was determined to counteract the potentially stale, overly explicit elements of Shattuck’s script.

Still, the studied restraint pays off, both in the first act and at critical moments towards the end. Particularly striking is the static long shot of a dreary kitchen, just after Lionel receives life-changing news.

Leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed, he bows his head, briefly overcome by emotion. He then quickly walks off-screen to grab his jacket, reappears, and leaves once again; The smoke from a cigarette left on the kitchen table continues to float through the frame.
Reviewed by Jake Wilson

History of Sound In cinemas starting Thursday