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Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The History of Sound' Review: Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor Star in a Gay Period Romance That's Like ‘Brokeback Mountain' on Sedatives
'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. More from Variety Neon Acquires North American Rights to Kleber Mendonça Filho's 'The Secret Agent' 'Homebound' Review: A Moving Friendship Drama Set Against a Politically Fractured India 'Romería' Review: A Budding Filmmaker Pursues Her Parents' Obscured Past in Carla Simón's Lovely, Pensive Coastal Voyage 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. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The women who stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and sustained a movement for social change
Historian Vicki Crawford was one of the first scholars to focus on women's roles in the civil rights movement. Her 1993 book, 'Trailblazers and Torchbearers,' dives into the stories of female leaders whose legacies have often been overshadowed. Today she is the director of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, where she oversees the archive of his sermons, speeches, writings and other materials. Here, she explains the contributions of women who influenced King and helped to fuel some of the most significant campaigns of the civil rights era, but whose contributions are not nearly as well known. Coretta Scott King is often remembered as a devoted wife and mother, yet she was also a committed activist in her own right. She was deeply involved with social justice causes before she met and married Martin Luther King Jr., and long after his death. Scott King served with civil rights groups throughout her time as a student at Antioch College and the New England Conservatory of Music. Shortly after she and King married in 1953, the couple returned to the South, where they lent their support to local and regional organizations such as the NAACP and the Montgomery Improvement Association. They also supported the Women's Political Council, an organization founded by female African American professors at Alabama State University that facilitated voter education and registration, and also protested discrimination on city buses. These local leadership efforts paved the way for widespread support of Rosa Parks' resistance to segregation on public busing. Following her husband's assassination in 1968, Scott King devoted her life to institutionalizing his philosophy and practice of nonviolence. She established the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, led a march of sanitation workers in Memphis and joined efforts to organize the Poor People's Campaign. A longtime advocate of workers rights, she also supported a 1969 hospital workers' strike in South Carolina, delivering stirring speeches against the treatment of African American staff. Scott King's commitment to nonviolence went beyond civil rights at home. During the 1960s, she became involved in peace and anti-war efforts such as the Women's Strike for Peace and opposed the escalating war in Vietnam. By the 1980s, she had joined protests against South African apartheid, and before her death in 2006, she spoke out in favor of LGBT rights – capping a lifetime of activism against injustice and inequalities. While Scott King's support and ideas were particularly influential, many other women played essential roles in the success of the civil rights movement. Take the most iconic moment of the civil rights struggle, in many Americans' minds: the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which King delivered his landmark 'I Have a Dream' speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 60 years after the march, it is critical to recognize the activism of women from all walks of life who helped to strategize and organize one of the country's most massive political demonstrations of the 20th century. Yet historical accounts overwhelmingly highlight the march's male leadership. With the exception of Daisy Bates, an activist who read a short tribute, no women were invited to deliver formal speeches. Women were among the key organizers of the march, however, and helped recruit thousands of participants. Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, was often the lone woman at the table of leaders representing national organizations. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who also served on the planning committee, was another strong advocate for labor issues, anti-poverty efforts and women's rights. Photographs of the march show women attended in large numbers, yet few historical accounts adequately credit women for their leadership and support. Civil rights activist, lawyer and Episcopalian priest Pauli Murray, among others, called for a gathering of women to address this and other instances of discrimination a few days later. African American women led and served in all the major campaigns, working as field secretaries, attorneys, plaintiffs, organizers and educators, to name just a few roles. So why did early historical accounts of the movement neglect their stories? There were women propelling national civil rights organizations and among King's closest advisers. Septima Clark, for example, was a seasoned educator whose strong organizing skills played a consequential role in voter registration, literacy training and citizenship education. Dorothy Cotton was a member of the inner circle of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which King was president, and was involved in literacy training and teaching nonviolent resistance. Yet women's organizing during the 1950s and 1960s is most evident at local and regional levels, particularly in some of the most perilous communities across the deep South. Since the 1930s, Amelia Boynton Robinson of Dallas County, Alabama, and her family had been fighting for voting rights, laying the groundwork for the struggle to end voter suppression that continues to the present. She was also key in planning the 50-mile Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. Images of the violence that marchers endured – particularly on the day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday – shocked the nation and eventually contributed to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Or take Mississippi, where there would not have been a sustained movement without women's activism. Some names have become well known, like Fannie Lou Hamer, but others deserve to be. Two rural activists, Victoria Gray and Annie Devine, joined Hamer as representatives to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a parallel political party that challenged the state's all-white representatives at the 1964 Democratic Convention. A year later, the three women represented the party in a challenge to block the state's congressmen from taking their seats, given ongoing disenfranchisement of Black voters. Though the congressional challenge failed, the activism was a symbolic victory, serving note to the nation that Black Mississippians were no longer willing to accept centuries-old oppression. Many African American women were out-front organizers for civil rights. But it is no less important to remember those who assumed less visible, but indispensable, roles behind the scenes, sustaining the movement over time. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Vicki Crawford, Morehouse College Read more: John Lewis and C.T. Vivian belonged to a long tradition of religious leaders in the civil rights struggle Wikipedia at 20: Why it often overlooks stories of women in history Civil rights legislation sparked powerful backlash that's still shaping American politics Vicki Crawford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
