Not since Brokeback Mountain has a film falsified human relations so badly as The History of Sound. It pretends to be a cultural history, opening with a lonely boy’s memory of growing up in the Kentucky backwoods of 1910, recalling the mountain songs that touched his heart. In 1917, he advances to the Boston Conservatory, where his instincts undergo refinement: Voice major Lionel (played by humdrum Paul Mescal) meets ambitious Composition major David (brash Josh O’Connor); they bond over their appreciation for the emotional sincerity of folk ballads. The haunting “The Unquiet Grave” serves as promise and prophecy.
Director Oliver Hermanus observes Lionel and David’s connection as an aspect of American cultural authenticity — truer than Brokeback Mountain, yet falling into similar inauthenticity. That’s because The Sound of History attempts to rewrite the past, validating romantic reticence by comparing it to hidden subcultures.
Lionel suffers passionate regret when David is enlisted during the First World War, instructing his first love, “Write. Send chocolate. Don’t die.” After this separation, the young lovers and musicologists reunite at war’s end and embark on an ethnographic mission, visiting hill country and recording folk songs using then-new Edison recording equipment.
Hermanus compares his academic pioneers to country folk through a vague, overly convoluted narrative. His explication of sexual and societal difference is immediately reticent. The men meet in a smoky but indeterminate bar or college lounge where the live singing promises the cultural truth of Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives. Yet even scenes of physical intimacy lack any link to the honest feeling and emotional purity of the songs that fascinate Lionel and David.
The History of Sound pretends to capture the legacy of passion and sensuality, but it seems that Hermanus (a South African treading American territory) harbors some political agenda in the way that the film turns Lionel and David into cultural pawns who cannot express emotions and are taciturn even with themselves. The film, based on short stories by Ben Shattuck, invokes social parallels to define the men’s marginal status.
On their sojourn, Lionel and David encounter a young black girl named Thankful Mary Swain (Brianna Middleton) and record her rendition of “Here in This Vineyard of My Lord,” making glib but ambiguous reference to racial subjugation and political oppression. “You step in front of police, they hurt you, kill you,” country boy Lionel instructs city boy David. Hermanus and Shattuck (who also wrote the screenplay) manipulate history to make dubious points about American bigotry. Their single-minded approach is dull, just like Hermanus’s dreary period visual style.
Even when the story lurches forward in time, showing David’s fate and Lionel’s emotional detachment in a failed, dishonest European heterosexual marriage, the film remains puzzlingly listless. (Chris Cooper portrays a wizened, scholarly Lionel in 1980, retrieving lost mementos.) This fatigue also infects the ultra-bland performances by Mescal and O’Connor who, despite being Hollywood flavors of the month, both give hangdog performances. They never excite their characters. It’s as if they realized that Shattuck intended to evoke Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage description: “His blue eyes had lost their colour; they had a listless droop; and his mouth, losing the fullness of youth, was weak and pale.”
Being as bland as Brokeback Mountain, The History of Sound conceals the audacity, courage, and insight learned from Maugham, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Herman Melville but hiding behind the legacy of folk music.
This rewrite of romantic history is a political failure. Hermanus and Shattuck forget that the word “history” derives from the Greek term that means “learning or knowing by inquiry.” The History of Sound is so aesthetically arid that it embraces repression.