The History of Sound a spectacular failure: Why Mescal and O’Connor miss the mark
What a waste of two very fine actors. Even the title of this movie is pretentious. I thought I could watch actor Paul Mescal until the cows come home. Turns out, I cannot.
Some of the most emotionally resonant films I’ve seen have been about homosexual love; their devastating alchemy staying with me long after other more conventional romances have faded. Brokeback Mountain. Call Me By Your Name. Portrait of a Lady on Fire. All of Us Strangers.
The History of Sound strains to be part of that hallowed collective, in every fibre of its being; aims to explode depth charges of feeling within.
It fails. Spectacularly. The signs were so promising. We’ve got a story about two young musicians meeting at the Boston Conservatory during World War I. Their secret love affair. A shared project to record the folk songs of rural Kentucky. A pull to convention. A lifetime of yearning. There’s so much in the bare bones of this story; a kick-on from that rarefied Merchant Ivory milieu, ripe for our screen-saturated age.
Writer Ben Shattuck adapted two of his short stories and Oliver Hermanus (Beauty, Living) directed. The team procured their dream men-of-the-moment: Irish A-lister Paul Mescal and English A-lister Josh O’Connor, yet neither writer nor director knew exactly what to do with their star-crossed lovers.
It doesn’t help that the men have little chemistry (for purely instructive purposes, see Mescal and Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers.) Mescal plays a passive and dour personality called Lionel, whose story this is; his usual gentle, boyish charm is strait-jacketed. We never see the struggle of our lead so can’t quite grasp the character. O’Connor’s David would have worked better as a tortured, charismatic, outwardly-conflicted figure, yet again we don’t get the inner life, so feel little emotion for his fate.
There are many long, meaningful stares. Achingly elegant fades-to-black. Shots of beautiful and sensitive men in rugged landscapes. Mescal, topless, floating on his back in a fountain in Rome; Mescal, topless, with his torso moonlit in the hall of an English stately home. It’s all rarefied to the point of airlessness. Nothing wallops you in the heart. Yes, there are some beautiful lines in the script. “I could see music. I could name the note my mother coughed every morning … My father would play a B Minor and my mouth went bitter,” but overall this film is mumbly as well as gloomy, with its palette of artfully sombre colours.
Old Kentucky tunes and ballads bead the spine of the narrative and should be at the celebratory centre of a movie that’s called The History of Sound, should be soaked through the story and foregrounded – yet the songs only delicately, tastefully, touch the edges of the film. They feel like an accessory to the writerly pretentiousness. What a wasted opportunity. The fault is in the story telling. We hear about dramatic events in voiceover rather than having them vividly rendered on screen. Moments of urgent narrative propulsion are flat. There’s little dramatic conflict. No grit. A tugging love story is buried in there somewhere but it’s been lost in translation. The entire production feels like it’s suffering from drama avoidance syndrome.
Do we care for these characters? No. Because we don’t know them well enough. What this film needed was someone other than the short story writer to adapt the source material, or a rigorous script editor who had the courage to stand up to both director and screenwriter and say, hang on, this could be so much better. Towards the end of The History of Sound a passage from a book is read out, which describes the old Kentucky ballads recorded here as “the most warm-blooded pieces of music”. Yet the film isn’t warm-blooded at all. It’s no-blooded. This isn’t a movie made for the screen-distracted age. Minds will wander, urging the narrative to – checks watch – hurry up. It’s not going to cut it with the scrolling generation. Yes, The History of Sound is beautifully shot and rigorously tasteful – it screams “quality cinema” – but it’s far too wrapped up in its own solemnity. Its earnestness. And the older I get the more I shy away from the portentously earnest.
Give me some air and light, please; some mess and magic of vivid life. What a waste of two very fine actors. Even the title is pretentious. I thought I could watch Mescal until the cows come home. Turns out, I cannot. (I was even obsessed by his necklace at one point, in his distant, Normal People past.)
If you’re a Mescal fan there’s only one thing for it: we need to hurry on to Hamnet.
2.5/5
History of Sound (M)
In cinemas December 18
Love culture? Sign up to our free newsletter for all the essential shows, compelling books, must-see films, and live performances that you need to know about here.
More Coverage
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout