The History of Sound

 

To say South African director Oliver Hermanus's The History of Sound is a gay drama is pretty reductive.

This quiet and pretty film is so much more than a love story; it's mainly about the many things in life we can keep and those we inevitably lose.

Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor star as Boston Conservatory students around the start of World War I who are drawn to each other by their love of folk songs.

During their meeting at a smoky local pub, Mescal's retiring singer Lionel and O'Connor's commanding composer David perform the folk ballad Silver Dagger, which David insists Lionel, who was reared on such songs back home in Kentucky, sing to bar patrons.

It's an important moment, and song, for the picture's narrative and will resonate as the friends become lovers and then partners on a project to record native songs on Edison wax cylinders all over New England.

Don't mistake, it's the songs -- not the romance between the schoolmates -- that lends weight and passion to the picture. Some might see that as the movie's biggest weakness. They wanted more Brokeback Mountain but skin and heat is not all the story is about.

Astute viewers will realize fairly quickly that David is a chameleonic charmer and begin to wonder, as Lionel does, what is real and what is artifice. But also like Lionel, the viewers' wariness will not keep them from being swept into David's world, his desire to preserve what is vanishing is palpable.

When the friends part after the song collecting project, they lose touch. Lionel goes abroad to perform, but eventually finds Rome and London can't offer him what he had while traipsing through the woods hunting songs with David. The last quarter of the film is Lionel trying to recapture that fire.

O'Connor is a wonderful actor, who breathes life into domineering David, but this is Mescal's picture, from start to finish, for he is like many of us -- not sure of what we want until it's gone.

And, perhaps more to the point of The History of Sound, not sure of who we want to be until we aren't that person anymore.