Can a surfeit of good taste be detrimental to a film? Yes, and this definitely applies to gay director Oliver Hermanus’ Queer Film “The History of Sound” which stars two of the hottest (looks and career trajectory) young, straight (ostensibly, but there have been rumours coming from one camp, in particular) actors around. Paul Mescal is Lionel, and Josh O’Connor is David, musicology students who meet at a conservatory in Boston circa 1917, toward the end of World War I. Later, David gets drafted, but due to his poor eyesight, Lionel does not. They journey on foot out into the countryside to record the voices and folk songs of ordinary people – these “recording sessions” are actually the best scenes in the movie and will bring tears to your eyes. Mescal’s Lionel has the gift of synesthesia – he can see and taste, in addition to hearing, sound waves, and Mescal does some gorgeous renditions of a few classic folk numbers. There is no Marni Nixon content here.
The movie’s reserved low-key feel initially works in its favor. The boys sleep together on the first night. It’s no big deal. There is no discussion. It just happens like it’s the most natural thing in the world, which, of course, it is. After a while, though, you begin to feel beaten down by the sheer refinement of it all. The perfectly framed, perfectly edited tableaux. The exquisite, sparingly used music score. The subtle, to the point of being abstruse, performances of the stars – a lot of what David tells Lionel about himself turns out to have never happened, and he redacts a lot of what has actually happened.
The events in the movie are seen and told by Lionel (there is some voice-over narration by Mescal), so, pretty much from the get-go, it’s Mescal’s movie. O’Connor appears in only a few scenes and exits the film before the halfway point. That is NOT what I expected when I signed on to watch this heavily publicized GAY movie. We, the audience, are being led to expect the second coming of Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain”, the Queer movie to which all other queer films will always be compared: my rating: “Brokeback Mountain A+, “The History of Sound” B-.
There is very little sex here. We get a discrete shot of Mescal’s naked butt, but that’s the high point. Both of these actors have done some deep and dirty gay sex scenes in other movies (O’Connor in “God’s Own Country” (2017) and Mescal in “All of Us Strangers” (2023) ), and you expect some action. Action like the way Matt Bomer plowed Jonathan Bailey in almost every episode of “Fellow Travellers.” It doesn’t have to be gay porn, but you expect something! It’s a testament to film’s low-key hypocrisy that the only orgasm scene in the movie is a heterosexual one. I mean, guys, where are you coming from?
And yet……..Mescal does give a potent melancholy performance filled with longing and obsession, even if we never get to know Lionel or find out why he treats some of the people in his life with such utter contempt (Luca, his boyfriend in Italy, played by Alessandro Bedetti and Clarissa Roux, his girlfriend in England, played by Emma Canning – as a sign of their times, both men attempt to have a relationship with a women). The audience is left filling in the blanks. Some of this may be due to Ben Shattuck’s adaptation of his novel of the same name, but most of the fault lies with the director. The entire production is so NICE! The second coming of “Brokeback” it isn’t.
STREAMING ON MUBI
https://thebrownees.net/seventy-queer-films-of-the-new-hollywood-1967-1981
