Propelled only by a strong performance by Josh O’Connor, along with stunning cinematography and beautiful music, The History of Sound echoes similar themes to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, but is told with greater melancholy and restraint, perhaps too much restraint. The film’s languid pace diminishes from its overall power or sense of urgency. It’s predictable and has very little capacity to surprise.
The story follows two young men, Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor), who meet at the New England Conservatory of Music and bond over their shared love of folk music. They enter an unspoken relationship, after all, it is 1917 and Lionel is from the Deep South.
Their relationship is cut short when David is drafted into the war, while Lionel must return home, he wasn’t drafted due to his poor eyesight. They later meet again, with David visibly broken by the war and they go walking across America, recording folk songs that people sing, passed down by generations to create a catalogue of the music of generations.
Director Oliver Hermanus and cinematographer Alexander Dynan create beautiful images of rural America – lush vegetation, great forested landscapes, lakes and rivers bursting with life. And these two young men walking through them, not speaking what they feel so openly while making a record of the music that has been passed down through generations so that they don’t get lost as the world changes. It’s quite poetic and lyrical when taken from a macro view of the film.
But at a little over two hours, with the film not fully engaging with the love story or the political commentary that it makes as they make their way through America – racism, homophobia, and more – we don’t really get to see a cohesive narrative that guides us through an emotional journey. Even the horrors of war are merely brushed upon but not really fully explored.
Mescal delivers a good performance, capturing the wide-eyed wonder Lionel feels toward David and the work that they are doing together, but is brought down my melancholy once again after the pair separate at the end of their project. The things left unspoken bear a heavy weight on him as he navigates through his life having lost David again. It’s a strong performance but nothing I haven’t seen before from Mescal. There are shades here of After Sun and All of Us Strangers and it’s nothing new.
It’s not a surprising performance, which leaves a lot of the heavy lifting on O’Connor, who is dazzling as the complex David. Aside from David’s challenging childhood, he returns after the war wearing a mask that says everything is alright, but he lets us in and makes us see that he’s wearing a mask. It’s solid work from an actor that is consistently surprising us with every major role he plays from Challengers to The Crown to Wake Up Dead Man.
I grew up listening to folk music through my dad, so on one level, I enjoyed watching the two crosses through the land to find these gorgeous songs. They are sung by various people and these scenes are exquisite. It tells a story of America, of how all of their culture is just passed down along to them from when they first arrived from the shores of Europe.
I felt the film made such a strong case for immigration and holding on to ones culture but none of it being endemic to the country that they were in. One way to look at it is that it is a colonizer’s story, and what makes it worse for me is that it probably was not meant to be that way.
My Rating: 1.5 Stars
Slow, lyrical, and heavy with longing, The History of Sound asks you to lean in and listen closely. Watch it in theaters and decide what lingers long after the final note fades.
