The History of Sound: A Queer Stealth-Folk Saga with Two of Today’s Most Intriguing Actors
By Liam Lacey
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When you think of music stereotypically associated with gay culture, such as show tunes or dance floor anthems, you don’t typically include antique Appalachian ballads about murdered lovers, faithless seducers and graveyard ghosts.
That difference is just one of the ways that The History of Sound, a period romance starring two of today’s most intriguing actors, Paul Mescal (Aftersun, All of Us Strangers) and Josh O'Connor (La Chimera Challengers), defies expectations in a rewarding way.
Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal in The History of Sound
Directed by the South African, Oliver Hermanus, (best known for Living, starring Bill Nighy, in an adaptation of the Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikuru) and adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story, History is subtle and exploratory.
Mescal and O’Connor star as a couple of music students on a field recording trip who spend the winter of 1919 in the New England woods, sharing a sleeping bag and tent, while collecting rural folk songs from local folk on wax cylinders.
They do this while rekindling a relationship that had begun two years before at a New England musical conservatory in Boston.
Since The History of Sound debuted at the Cannes film festival last May, it has been measured against Ang Lee’s 20-year-old Brokeback Mountain. Apart from both films having scenes of al fresco sex, this is not a particularly useful comparison. Fundamentally, they’re different genres: Brokeback Mountain was a crime story while History is closer to a crypto musical or stealth folk opera. The film’s rewards are more contemplative than dramatic, relying on the subtle expensiveness of the actors, Alexander Dyanan’s painterly cinematography, and the melancholy beauty of the soundtrack, blending traditional songs and orchestral music, expressing the deep emotions the two men hold in check.
In an opening voice-over narration, we hear an aged Lionel (voiced by Chris Cooper, who plays him as a senior in the last act), a farmer’s son from Kentucky, describes how he is a synesthete, not just hearing music but seeing it as colours and tasting its tastes, as well as, being able to identify the exact note of a dog’s bark or his mother’s cough.
Thanks to a caring teacher, Lionel’s gift lands him a spot as a scholarship student at the elite Massachusetts school. One night at a smokey bar, Lionel hears another student, David (O’Connor), singing and playing piano. He recognizes that the piano player playing a traditional Appalachian song that he learned from his banjo-plucking father (Raphael Sbarge) and Lionel introduces himself.
The two men are a study in contrasts: Lionel, with his hunched shoulders, wire-framed glasses and awkward humility, is a farm boy, eager and open. David, a wealthy orphan, partly raised in England and in wealthy Newport, Rhode Island, is sophisticated and reflexively ironic.
Soon the two are exchanging musical knowledge and long, appreciative gazes. Later that night, David invites Lionel walk him home and invites him to his apartment for a glass of water, then spits it playfully in Lionel’s face. They go to bed together. The relationship continues, mostly on weekends (“a few nights in one season,” as Lionel recalls) until David is drafted to go overseas and join the war, while Lionel is excluded because of his weak eyesight.
“Write. Send chocolate. Don’t die,” he implores his friend.
With classes shut down because of the war, Lionel returns to the farm and his now widowed and ill mother (Molly Price). A couple of years later, Lionel hears from David again, now working at a college in Maine, who invites Lionel to join him for his song-gathering journey.
Against his mother’s objections, Lionel answers the summons, joining David on his long walk in the woods, visiting rural communities to record traditional songs. As the novice musicologists extract songs from the past, they also uncover their emotions.
There’s the visceral thrill of discovery in several scenes of the two men, sitting around kitchen tables with their primitive recording equipment, accumulating a box of wax cylinder recordings holding songs from past. The generations-old tunes speak of buried emotions, including the ghostly The Unquiet Grave, about a dead woman in a cemetery who wishes her grieving lover would move on and let her rest.
The winter music project carries through to roughly the first half of the film. Near the end of the trip, the two men have a minor disagreement. Shortly after, David, whose behaviour suggests he is emotionally distracted, asks: “Do you ever worry about this? What we’re doing?”
Lionel doesn’t worry, but something in the relationship has permanently shifted. Shortly after, David abruptly calls an end to the relationship, rejecting Lionel’s offer to continue to work as his assistant. He suggests that Lionel get on with his life, and pursue a professional singing career, perhaps in Europe. (A quibble: Mescal sings tunefully but there’s nothing about his voice that suggests he’s that talented a singer.)
Jump forward to 1923, to Lionel glancing through a fluttering lace-curtained window and hearing the sound of church bells: Now he is in Rome. singing in and conducting an elite men’s church choir, sending multi-part harmonies to God and the congregation. But Lionel is restless. He bluntly tells the young cellist (Alessandro Bedetti), that he’s been sleeping with, that he’s bored and wants to move on.
He takes a job offer as a choir master in Oxford and a year later, he’s with a vivacious and wealthy young woman, Clarissa (Emma Canning) who he also treats carelessly. Trapped in his memories of David and the intense, if brief, life-changing connection, he’s insensitive to those who love him more than he loves them. More than once, lost in memory, he lays down to sleep on a bare floor, recalling his nights in the forest.
As the years flit by, through its middle act, The History of Sound has a desultory quality, indicative of Lionel’s rootlessness, but also precarious to the film’s pacing. If the film’s execution doesn’t always rise to the level of its elusive ambitions, the fault is not a lack of sincerity.
Critics who have dismissively accused the movie of excessive tasteful restraint miss the point: Some kinds of intense emotional pain can only be expressed indirectly, in the hunched physicality of Lionel’s body and his impassive expression, or in those brief liberating moments of song.
The History of Sound. Directed by Oliver Hermanus, written by Ben Shattuck. Starring; Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Chris Cooper, Molly Price, Raphael Sbarge, Hadley Robinson and Alessandro Bedetti. A History of Sound opens in theatres across Canada on Sept 19.