‘The History of Sound' Review: Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor Star in a Gay Period Romance That's Like ‘Brokeback Mountain' on Sedatives

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21-05-2025

'The History of Sound' is a gay love story in which no one ever comes out and says what's on their minds. We get why. The film is set in the early 20th century, and its two lead characters start off as polite, buttoned-down music students in New England, not exactly the sort of people who get up in the morning with an inner cry of 'We're here! We're queer! Get used to our awards buzz!' Nevertheless, for this sort of movie to work, the scenes need to vibrate with an inner emotional hum. They can't just dawdle and meander into some flat zone of prosaic free-floating 'suggestiveness.'
In 'Brokeback Mountain,' the two lead characters spent more time than not repressing who they were, and that turned the film into a tragedy. It's also one of the greatest movies ever made. Heath Ledger, speaking in a muffled drawl, showed you that a performance could be repressed and transcendent at the same time; his reticence broke your heart. By contrast, 'The History of Sound,' which might be described as a minimalist 'Masterpiece Theatre'-on-the-frontier riff on 'Brokeback,' is a drama that mostly just sits there. It's far from incompetent, but it's listless and spiritually inexpressive. It's 'Brokeback Mountain' on sedatives.
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Lionel (Paul Mescal), raised on a farm in Kentucky, and David (Josh O'Connor), who grew up as a wealthy orphan in Newport, Rhode Island, meet one night at a piano bar when they're both students at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. The year is 1917. David is seated at the piano, singing an American folk song, and that catches Lionel's ear, because he grew up singing folk songs he learned from his fiddle-playing father. This is the music in his blood — and as he informs us during the film's opening narration, he's such a musically inclined soul that notes literally make him see colors. David, tickling the ivories, has an eager, wolfish grin and a taunting attitude — he's like a more ebullient Hoagy Carmichael. David, in his wireless oval-framed glasses, is more restrained and conservative. But it's clear that the two are musical soulmates and, as they lock eyes on each other, singing and playing into the night, maybe more.
They stroll home in the dusky dawn, and David asks Lionel if he'd like to come up to his dormitory apartment for a drink of water. Lionel says yes, and before more than a few moments go by the two have tumbled into bed, without fear or hesitation. The following morning, Lionel wakes up to find the bed empty, though with a note from David on the pillow. It says 'Next Saturday?' In those two simple words, and in Lionel's look of beatific serenity, we can feel the promissory tug of romantic bloom.
It's implicit, to the audience and to the characters, that they're living in a society where they can't be open about any of this — where it would be fatal to do so. I say implicit because nothing in 'The History of Sound' would ever be stated that overtly; if it were, the film wouldn't have the cred of its faux 'subtlety.' At the same time, the period setting, and Lionel's rural Southern background, helps account for the lack of copious dialogue. We're in an era, the film implies, when people weren't as self-conscious or effusively verbal as they are today. Lionel and David were born in the late 19th century, and the quality of their romance is that they simply fall in with each other and like being together. The love scenes, passionate but not too explicit, are tender visions of entwined flesh. If either of these two harbor any guilt about their attraction to each other, they don't show it.
The romance gets interrupted by World War I. David goes off to fight in the trenches, and Lionel returns to the farm, which proves to be an unhappy experience, especially after his father dies. He's in a holding pattern. But then, in 1919, he receives a letter from David: 'Meet me Jan. 1 at the Augusta Train Station.' David, back from the war, wants Lionel to accompany him on an extended camping trip to record folk musicians in the wilderness of Maine. And as they embark on this journey, they enter a place of artistic and erotic and spiritual communion that feels close to paradise. David, who possesses the technology to record sound on wax cylinders, is a kind of early Alan Lomax figure, a budding ethnomusicologist who wants to 'collect' songs, to take the low-country majesty of folk music, captured in the raw, and elevate it through his recordings into something eternal.
Oliver Hermanus, the South African filmmaker who directed 'The History of Sound,' is working from a script by Ben Shattuck (who wrote the short story the movie is based on), and he tries to build a stately picturesque style around the spareness of Shattuck's dialogue. The film is quite handsome, full of woodsy earth tones and dark clothing, without any bright colors to get in the way of the meditative somberness. But the flow of images is more functional than poetic. I would describe the film's style as Kelly Reichardt with less precision.
Hermanus is relying a lot on the aura of his actors, but in this case he only gets half of what he needs. Josh O'Connor, as the outwardly brash but inwardly secretive and vulnerable David, makes his presence felt in every scene. But Paul Pescal, sporting a very mild Southern accent, never seems like a kid from Kentucky. He's too formal, too bereft of folksy humor. There's a stillness to Mescal's performance that's just…still. It doesn't radiate anything. And that's part of what accounts, I think, for the crucial turning point in the story — the one that fails to track on the film's own terms.
In their backwoods recording venture, Lionel and David have become partners in love and sound. At one point, they have an argument that lasts for about 30 seconds (about whether they should have left a situation), and then they're grinning at each other like schoolboys again. So when David asks Lionel if he would consider trying to get a teaching position at the New England Conservatory, he's saying a mouthful. In spirit, it's practically a marriage proposal. He's saying: Do this so that we can be together.
In 'Brokeback Mountain,' when Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack suggests that he and Ennis live together on a ranch in rural Wyoming, Ennis shoots the idea down. He says it won't work — that they'd be made as two queers, essentially outed by their living situation. The social intolerance that surrounds them is toxic, like fire from a pile of burning tires. But in 'The History of Sound,' Lionel and David, while they've on the down-low, have proven to be quite adept at it, and have displayed no visible anxiety about the need to conceal their affair. Trying to be together on a permanent basis would obviously be far more challenging, maybe fraught with peril. Perhaps it would be doomed. But surely the two brave and ardent men we've been watching could try. So when Pascal's Lionel says no, he's not going to go for that teaching position, I basically went, 'Huh?' The film's love story has run smack into its key obstacle, and the obstacle turns out to be…a script that needed a rewrite.
We're halfway through the movie, and there will be many turns of events. It's 1921, and Lionel is now in Italy. He has sent letters once a month to David, and the letters have gone unanswered. Lionel will travel to Britain, he will become involved, romantically and sexually, with Clarissa (Emma Canning), but he will never stop feeling that ache inside him. He will be drawn, inexorably and over time, back to the New England Conservatory, back to the love inside him that dares not speak its name. All of which sounds, on paper, quite poignant and haunting. So do the scenes with Chris Cooper as the aging Lionel. But 'The History of Sound' is a movie that never fully finds a life beyond what it is on paper. It wants to wrench our hearts, but coming 20 years after 'Brokeback Mountain' did that very thing, this thin-blooded, art-conscious knockoff of that film's tragedy is a movie that may end up falling in theaters without making a sound.
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