Prepare the Brokeback Mountain comparisons now, because Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor’s tender romance has all the ingredients of Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning queer love story. Like that Annie Proulx adaptation, it’s based on a short story (by Ben Shattuck, who adapts here) and is set in the woods and hills of rural America (Maine, rather than Wyoming). It’s full of the stifled emotions of two men who fall in love but can’t quite express it.
The only thing missing – and it’s a biggie – is the deep passion that coursed beneath the surface of that Oscar winning western. South African director Oliver Hermanus finds plenty of deep feeling and sincerity here but his beautiful-looking, measured period piece gets stifled by its own languors – especially in a first half that needs a slug or two of moonshine to inject some life into it.
As he’s proved twice already, with gorgeous Ikiru remake Living and striking queer bootcamp drama Moffie, Hermanus is guided by a powerful sense of empathy and compassion. Here, he follows the story of Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), two music students who meet at Boston Conservatory in 1917 and bond over their shared love of folk music. Lionel, a gentle country boy blessed with an ability to see music – synesthesia – is the shy outsider; David is an east coaster with easy confidence and a boyish sense of mischief.
They fall into bed, but their love remains unspoken and undefined. Soon, David is in uniform and off to the Great War trenches of France, while the conflicted but dutiful Lionel heads home to care for his dying mother. The next time they meet will be for a walking tour of Maine, suggested by David, where they’ll gather folk songs from small New England communities and record them for posterity.
Hermanus has crafted a quiet, touching torch song to lost love
This Bill Bryson-meets-Llewellyn Davis project gives Mescal and O’Connor plenty of shared screen time as the pair’s chemistry shines through. O’Connor seeds the once-buoyant David with wartime trauma. Mescal, in owlish Harry Potter specs, shows new colours as the sensitive Lionel, though his subdued performance sometimes over-matches the stillness of these beautiful rural tableaus.
Happily, The History of Sound turns up the volume in a second half that spans the 1920s and follows Lionel to Rome and Oxford, where unhappy dalliances await, including one with Emma Canning’s bubbly upper-class beauty. It’s a different kind of gay love story – there’s less sense of David wrestling with his sexuality than trying to find a way to remain true to himself as he gradually accepts what he’s lost.
Ultimately, what emerges is a film about loneliness, about someone important slipping away in a way that will come to define your life. There may be few fireworks, but Hermanus has crafted a quiet and touching torch song to lost love.
The History of Sound premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.