The History of Sound
Director: Oliver Hermanus
Cert: 12A
Starring: Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Chris Cooper, Peter Mark Kendall, Molly Price, Raphael Sbarge, Hadley Robinson
Running Time: 2 hrs 8 mins
The latest drama from Oliver Hermanus, director of the fine Moffie and the heartbreaking Living, has, on paper, all that is required for a middlebrow succès d’estime.
It features two of the era’s most celebrated actors. The story rubs against traumas of the first World War. Who wouldn’t want to watch handsome young intellectuals connecting with then-undocumented folk music from the American interior?
Following a muted premiere in the Cannes competition, The History of Sound has, however, singularly failed to gather a following. It seems destined, as Hamnet surges, to be classed as “the other Paul Mescal film” of the new year.
The picture is not without its virtues. Shot in evocative dun shades by Alexander Dynan, The History of Sound persuasively summons up a rural United States that – as we know now, but the protagonists then did not – harboured influences that would dominate mainstream popular music from the second half of the 20th century.
Mescal and Josh O’Connor, the former curled inwards, the latter initially more open, connect powerfully as two young men who don’t quite grasp the romantic furies they have unleashed. But this is ultimately a too-polite film that, after setting off early sparks, ends up kicking its heels distractedly for the closing 40 minutes.
Back in 1917, at the New England Conservatory of Music, Lionel Worthing (Mescal) and David White (O’Connor) hook up in a college bar and return home for sex. Both have a passion for raw folk music and a need to document the corners in which it germinated. Lionel is from a humble rural background; David is from old money: the perfect complementary combination for musicological research.
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War then intervenes. Whereas Lionel is ineligible for the draft, David goes off to fight and returns a notably different man. Reconciled, they embark on a trip, funded by a Maine college, to record the music of the land on wax cylinders. There are reminders here of Alan Lomax’s famous field recordings – undertaken more than two decades later – that came to be so influential on Bob Dylan and his followers.
This deserves to be the core of the project, but it proves to be mere diversion in a film that is much taken up with drawn-out aftermath. Lionel moves to Europe, touching down in Rome and then at the University of Oxford.
David fades out of the picture (indeed, O’Connor is essentially a supporting player here) as his ex-lover endures an array of only modestly interesting complications before returning home to deal with a dying mother.
There is endless underexploited potential here. Anyone coming with the hope of enlightenment on origins of the music is likely to be disappointed. The tunes are background accompaniment to a downstage psychological drama that never properly takes off.
Mescal has called comparisons with Brokeback Mountain “lazy and frustrating”, but, as the film moves to a sombre close, it is impossible to avoid the accumulating narrative echoes. Adapted from a story by Ben Shattuck, the screenplay does not do enough work on the central relationship to achieve the emotional surge we got at the close of the Ang Lee film. A closing coda is undermined by a bizarre music cue that, seven months after premiere, still has me scratching my head in bafflement.
This is a classy production performed by engaging actors at the top of their considerable games. Individual sequences have a muted beauty that speaks to the professionalism of all involved. There is, however, the sense throughout of a film rustling through its own innards in search of an emotional ember that refuses to catch fire. Nice to look at. Nice to listen too. Easily forgotten.
In cinemas from Friday, January 23rd