Director: Oliver Hermanus
Stars: Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Chris Cooper
As the camera floats over delicate images of the American pastoral, narrating protagonist Lionel (Paul Mescal) talks of the synaesthesia he discovered as a child, seeing music, and through this developing a (super)natural aptitude. These talents take him from a poor, rural farmstead in Kentucky to a music conservatory in New England where, as a young man, he meets his effete contemporary David (Josh O’Connor). Romancing over their shared love of traditional American folk music, the pair pursue a private, intimate relationship, even as the trenches of the so-called Great War draft David into their mires.
The History of Sound covers 70 years of Lionel’s life, but in its telling only one year – one season – truly resonated for him; that winter of 1917. Returning somewhat tight-lipped from the front lines, David takes Lionel on a trip around Maine, collecting songs from the local communities which he records on wax cylinders with a phonograph. Contemporaneously, this passage of the film only takes up a small amount of the overall running time, but it becomes the fulcrum. The load-baring point for the struggles, drifting and emptiness that comes after. In the years following, pursuing a career that takes him to Rome and Oxford, Lionel is a listless malcontent. And while a family tragedy ultimately draws him home, it really presents a serendipitous opportunity to reconnect and perhaps relive his halcyon days on the trails with David.
Evidently filmed over the course of a brittle, crisp winter, director Oliver Hermanus struggles to move The History of Sound out of this frigidity. Regardless of where we go or the passing of time, it always seems to be winter for Lionel, making for a poetic but rather cold presentation. This extends to the emotional register. This is the world of buttoned-down, understated pining, chaste through Lionel and David’s understanding that their love for one another remain private. That the times they live in would find it unseemly. But this need to obey conventions of taste tend to contain and constrict the film. There’s a permafrost not just to the landscape but to the temperament.
Where it does briefly come alive is in the early passages of singing, which bring to mind kindred flourishes in the filmography of Terence Davies, where song was used to evoke nostalgia, community and kinship. Lionel and David’s meet-cute over a piano at a bustling tavern is one for the ages, especially thanks to the wonderfully calibrated performances from both actors, but it’s as warm as the picture ever manages to be. Even in the rare sexual clinches we’re afforded, things are kept cool and clipped. The History of Sound begs a little to be let out of the box more.
The duo’s wandering journey together through Maine gathering folk songs is pretty enough. Unacknowledged is how these love songs don’t fully speak for these men; so often paeans of hetero-normative love. The women who come into their lives feel like substitutes and shadows. Beards, to use a slang parlance. The feminine roles in these songs hang suspended in the air like ghosts, ill-fitting molds for either Lionel or Davis to presume.
Ultimately The History of Sound becomes about the kind of life one has when its defining moments occur young. It’s about the longing to have those prized moments back. The sadness of this futility. And the emptiness around it all. That yearning is well manifested, and so in many respects Hermanus’ film (elaborated from a short story by Ben Shattuck) is a success, but it can be a maudlin place to linger.
For a film so invested in the power of song, of intonation, of moments, it commits an almost unforgivable sin in its coda when we jump to 1980. We’re hit full-bore by a piece of non-diegetic pop music (presumably to further anchor us in the new milieu). Now, I love “Atmosphere” by Joy Division. It’s an all-timer. But having it compete with a tender stretch of narration – one that feels pivotal to the film’s final third – is a conspicuous auditory gaff. A clunking misstep that distracts entirely from the emotional intent of the entire sequence (and which also undermines Chris Cooper’s performance as Lionel’s older self). It takes a good few minutes for The History of Sound to right itself in the aftermath. To re-settle and refocus on the intent; bittersweet nostalgia and the tight-chest of longing that has defined the picture.
A little too delicate, a little to restrained, a little too tasteful, The History of Sound is handsome in all the right ways, but too often frozen stiff. I longed for it to thaw a little. Pining, myself, for moments to match that warm tavern meet-cute. Waiting and hoping for moments that never came.
The Lost Highway Hotel 