Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal in ‘The History of Sound.’ (Image courtesy of MUBI)
To most of us today, folk music is just another genre. We might have some general knowledge that it originated as rustic traditional songs handed down across generations, but few of us likely think much about it beyond that.
If we did, we might recognize how much human experience, with all its joys and sorrows, was wrapped inside those traditional tunes, and how many private emotions are refracted in them through each link in the human chain that passes them down – and that is what “The History of Sound” (Oliver Hermanus’ new film, starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor) tries to convey. It’s an esoteric idea, to be sure, but the South African director (whose film “Beauty,” won the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2011) has a sophisticated cinematic vocabulary capable of getting it across, and it certainly helps that he uses a sexy and passionate queer love story as the vehicle to take us there.
Set in the years around World War I, it’s the story of Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), two music students who meet at college in 1917; Lionel comes from humble origins in the farmlands of Maine before, while David is a young man of status and means, yet it’s as close to love at first sight as you can get. They strike a spark together that only grows brighter as their passion for music bonds them deeper. Of course, it’s 1917, and history is about to get in the way. War is declared, the college is closed, and David is called to active service in Europe, while Lionel returns home to a farm that’s declining along with his family’s already meager fortunes.
After the war, David returns, world-weary from his time in the trenches but eager to get back to his musical studies – and to Lionel, whom he asks to accompany him on a trip through rural Maine to collect local folk songs by recording them on wax cylinders for study and for posterity. Their journey together is idyllic; they connect deeply with the music – and the people – they encounter and record along the way, and embrace their love for each other without reservation. When it ends, however, they go their separate ways.
From there, the story leaps ahead, following Lionel as his academic career takes him to Europe and a life he never dreamt of – all the while haunted by memories of David. Eventually, fate provides a thread that might bring them together once more – leading him to hidden secrets that cast a whole new light on their love for each other, and that add yet another layer of personal meaning to the folk songs that once brought them together.
It would be easy to play up the sex appeal of the lead couple Hermanus scored to enact his heartfelt opus about love, music, and an eternal thread of shared human experience – indeed, the press around this buzzy movie, which was a favorite at this year’s Cannes festival (where it was nominated for the Queer Palm), has focused most of its attention on the chemistry between its two “It-Boy” stars, neither of whom publicly identifies as queer but who have both established themselves firmly as dedicated to the authentic portrayal of queer experience.
That chemistry, unsurprisingly, is epic. Mescal, whose irresistibly masculine appeal is deepened by the vulnerable sensitivity he brings to his characters, both here and in previous films (such as the haunting “All of Us Strangers”), melts our hearts and wins our respect with a performance that feels almost sacred in its stubborn refusal to abandon queer hope; O’Connor, who so searingly welded us to his struggle over homophobic self-loathing in “God’s Own Country” long before his stint as Prince Charles on “The Crown” or his bisexual-teasing turn in “Challengers,” provides a tantalizingly opaque portrait of “prudently” compliant queer identity, coupled with an implied-but-essential element of “don’t ask, don’t tell” which lends the whole thing a tragic air of compromised resignation. Yet the combination somehow evokes our own deepest fantasies, our true-romance daydreams of finding a queer “eye of the hurricane” in which it is possible to live our truth, shielded from the strictures imposed by the larger society.
Inevitably, there are comparisons to be made with “Brokeback Mountain,” the quintessential tragic gay love story that shares its contrast of pastoral bliss and societal obligation and mirrors the star-crossed romance which drives it; and while we’ll be the first to say that we wish we no longer had to see onscreen queer love thwarted by tragedy, timing, and social convention, we can’t deny that it’s important to be reminded of the reality that has made that trope so eternally relevant – especially in a time when any advances we may have made toward living an open life have been critically endangered by a political climate that seems bent on rolling us all back into the closet,
In any case, it hardly matters. “The History of Sound” might move a bit too slowly for some tastes, or indulge in its fascination with music a little too deeply to suit those who are just there for the love story, but it ultimately succeeds in making us identify with its lovers’ boldness to embrace their lives fully, and the sanctuary they provide for each other behind the camouflage they must maintain in the larger world. It’s the tightrope of living in a homophobic society, rendered vividly in Hermanus’ leisurely-paced, deeply compassionate, and utterly heart-stirring period narrative – adapted for the screen by Ben Shattuck, from two of his own short stories – and left in our laps to contemplate as the final credits roll.
What elevates it beyond that bittersweet validation of queer love, in all its devastating cultural inconvenience, is its profoundly felt embrace of music as an ongoing record of human existence; “The History of Sound” is also a history of hardships and sorrows, of hopes and dreams and inspirations, and by invoking that continuous thread of lived experience, binds it to the long-obscured reality of queer love that has always existed outside the margins, reminding us that we’ve always been part of an ongoing story that is still being written today.
In all its candid melancholy, it reminds us that we are and have always been a part of the whole, despite the objections of small minds and the whims of societal acceptance, and that’s more than enough to justify all the industry buzz that precedes it.
And if you need more encouragement to see it, that spitting scene is pretty hot, too.
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