The History of Sound follows the life of Lionel (Paul Mescal), a Kentucky-native in pre-WWI America studying vocal performance at a conservatory. When he meets David (Josh O’Connor), another student at the conservatory, they bond over a shared passion for traditional American folk music. Though their attraction to each other is instant, their brief romance is destined for heartbreak. While lugging a cumbersome phonograph across the New England countryside, the pair set out to discover little-heard folk tunes from the region and commit these songs to a collection of wax cylinders—unbeknownst to Lionel, this trip will serve as the last time the two men ever spend together. Based on the short story of the same name by Ben Shattuck, the film follows Lionel’s decades-long fascination with the enigmatic young man who came in and out of his life so fleetingly, leaving little-to-no trace of his existence behind. The History of Sound is the story of voices recorded in wax and moments lost to time—the ways in which happiness greets us in the most unexpected of places and passes through just as quickly as it arrived.
Not unlike Oliver Hermanus’ previous effort Living—a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru—much of the magic of the source material is lost in translation. The true failing of The History of Sound lies not merely in its inability to bring to life Shattuck’s story, but in the fact that it so fully diminishes those characters and scenes crafted in the source material, despite some smart casting choices. So restrained and filled with dead air, the attempt to expand the story to fill the two-hour runtime effectively leaves its audience cold and detached from the characters rather than devoted to this story of a love that never really was.
O’Connor delivers the enigmatic quality that the character calls for with a mischievous smile, a far-off gaze, and a somber affect that quietly hints at the impact fighting in the war has had upon his psyche. Mescal’s performance is controlled and largely well-executed, though Chris Cooper’s aged portrayal of the same character ultimately upstages the younger actor’s efforts. When O’Connor exits screen—and spends the rest of the film appearing only in brief flashbacks—his absence does not accentuate Lionel’s heartbreak, rather leaving the movie grasping for anything of substance to hold onto. O’Connor’s less-than-polished singing voice actually adds to what little poignancy the film manages to muster; David is a man fascinated by music with a keen ear and a knack for piano—he doesn’t need a pretty voice to seal the deal. That’s where Mescal has to step up. When the two men first meet at the local pub and Lionel catches David banging out the chords of a folk tune he recognizes from back home, much fuss is made over Lionel’s supernaturally beautiful voice. Mescal’s singing isn’t unconvincing in this initial showcase, though we as an audience must spend the rest of the movie buying into the notion that his moderate talent has provided him the opportunity to sing in some of the greatest choirs in the world.
Musical chops aside, ultimately the chemistry between these two men does not strike the intended chord. We watch their bodies collide and drift apart, but the film takes too literally the “happiness is not a story” line that Lionel retrospectively applies to the weeks that the pair spend wandering the forest, searching for hidden voices and sleeping beneath the stars. An exemplary exchange on the night of their first meeting shows David awkwardly spitting water into Lionel’s mouth after he brings him back to sleep in his apartment. The playful act comes across as uncomfortable and is unmotivated by any real sexual tension between the two. A touch of the Merchant Ivory treatment, à la Maurice, or even a page or two taken from the notebook of Terence Davies’ Benediction might have saved this film from its stolid nature and perhaps injected a sense of true passion and devastation into a story absolutely begging for a little life.
The History of Sound drags badly in the latter half. There are long, drawn-out segments in which Lionel seeks out David’s wife, travels to England, and spends time singing in Rome, all of which feel like unnecessary and unfocused detours that lead us away from the place the story desperately wants to return to: the wax cylinders that the men collect in the first part of the film which remain lost to time for many decades of Lionel’s life. These cylinders come to represent the imperfect human attempt to preserve fleeting moments of true happiness, which often turn out to be few and far between. And yet, when the story eventually makes its way back to these cylinders, our interest and attention have already drifted elsewhere.
Lionel describes American folk as “warm-blooded” music. It feels honest and real. It taps into a deeply human and otherwise ineffable experience. There’s something incredibly endearing about the technical effort required to record any kind of sound using the rudimentary technology available in the early part of the 20th century. Because of the low-fidelity of these recordings, listening to them grants us that touching, indelible sense that a loved-one’s voice has traversed not merely space but also time to reach us—accomplishing an impossible task just to say goodbye. The climactic scene in which Cooper’s Lionel listens to a cylinder etched with David’s voice from so many years prior serves as the emotional gut punch the film spends its entire two-hour and seven minutes striving toward. Cooper’s performance delivers in ways that the rest of the film does not. We are left to wonder, not as to why David vanished as he did, but whether his love affair with Lionel was even worth the waste of a good wax cylinder.