How much stifled yearning can one gay period drama take? That’s a question confronted by Oliver Hermanus’s modern film The History of Sound, which pr
How much stifled yearning can one gay period drama take? That’s a question confronted by Oliver Hermanus’s modern film The History of Sound, which premiered here in Cannes on May 21. The film, based on a brief story by Ben Shattuck, is about two teenage men who first meet in 1917, just before America heads to war. Those were certainly repressive times for queer people—yet music conservatory students Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor) fall into bed together rather easily, bonding over their shared love of American folk music and no doubt drawn to each other’s considerable good looks.
Hermanus doesn’t show us anything particularly steamy, but he does successfully create an air of serene ardency, especially coming from Lionel. David, the orphan of a wealthy Newport family, is a bit more coy in his affections, while Lionel—who grew up in rural Kentucky before a singing scholarship brought him to study in Boston—looks at David with bedazzled wonderment. But Lionel is a serene fellow, and the wealth of affection he feels for his friend and lover is never spoken aloud. Soon, the two are separated by war. When a haunted David returns from the trenches, he invites Lionel on a trip around rural Maine, where they will spend their days recording local singers and their nights rolling around together in a tent.
The tent stuff does, inevitably, bring to mind Brokeback Mountain, another restrained, handsomely staged drama of gay men in harsh times. But History of Sounds is on an even lower simmer than that film, asking its audience to sustain themselves mostly on loaded looks and hushed subtext. At times, Hermanus’s style is effective, selling us on the film’s lonely, years-spanning heartsickness. But too often the film’s muted emotion feels more gimmicky than credible to Lionel and David’s circumstances, particularly because Hermanus is so demure about sex; we barely even see the men kissing. Maybe Hermanus is harkening back to a storytelling era when homoeroticism did have to exist as mere suggestion, but History of Sound plays more as overly mannered pastiche than worthy contributor to that tradition.
Which isn’t to say that the film is without power. As it glides toward its bittersweet conclusion, and Chris Cooper enters the picture as an elderly Lionel, the movie’s air of impossible ache becomes potent. It successfully connects romance and music, arguing that Lionel and David’s love was its own kind of eternal folk song—that the compact clamor and motion of all of our lives is part of some grander human symphony.
Throughout the film, Mescal sturdily embodies Lionel’s restlessness and longing, convincingly portraying a dedicated loner who will never quite stop mourning a life that war, repression, and time denied him. His Kentucky twang may be a bit strained, but otherwise Mescal is a fine vessel for the film’s mood—though I do think I’d like to see him play something other than a laconic tender-heart with watery eyes before too long. (Gladiator doesn’t count.)
It’s O’Connor who makes the strongest impression. Though he has the smaller role, he does a lot with less. He pitches David as wistful, witty, and slightly effete, a child of tragic privilege who may have become some gregarious dandy had his time in France not shell-shocked him so violently. O’Connor makes Lionel’s love for David wholly understandable: who wouldn’t fall for this alluring spirit, with his wry smile that hints at a melancholy, secret knowledge of the world?
O’Connor is so good in the film that, much like Lionel, one hungers for ever more of him. And one pines for the sporadic drama of this kind which recognizes that, despite the prejudices of the past, there have been gay people in almost every era who enjoyed lasting, wholly requited relationships. Yes, many have been barred—or have barred themselves—from realizing their desire over the centuries. But others did find a way. I would love to see O’Connor in an adaptation of, say, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair, which breathtakingly chronicles a lineage of gay men across the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Hollinghurst acknowledges what constrained these men while allowing the reader to marvel at the ways they thrived anyway—loved, lost, communed.
Of course, stories like The History of Sound have their place too. Hermanus’s film is respectable and frequently poignant. That I wanted to yell at the screen “just tell him you love him and kiss already!” may be owed more to my up-to-date impatience than to any failure of the film. And perhaps History of Sound does actually have some relevance to today. After all, some of us will never be with Josh O’Connor even when we so desperately want to be. We’re all a little star-crossed, I suppose.
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