The History of Sound – Film Review
by Frank L.

Director – Oliver Hermanus
Writer – Ben Shattuck
Stars – Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Chris Cooper

It is 1910. Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) is a musical child prodigy. In his late adolescence, because of his innate musical precocity, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music. While there, in a bar, he encounters David White (Josh O’Connor), a singer, who is somewhat older than Lionel and is fascinated by the traditional music of country folk. Lionel and David have an immediate connection which ends in a passionate relationship.

At this time, America is on the verge of entering the First World War, and David is called up to fight. Lionel returns to his family farm in Kansas. When the war is over, and David returns in 1919, he makes contact with Lionel, asking him to assist him on a field trip in Maine, where he is working on a college programme to collect songs by traditional singers on wax cylinders. Their romantic flame is rekindled. However, David must return to his mainstream work, and Lionel decides to go to Europe to further his musical career. Lionel writes to David, but after a while, he ceases to do so as his letters remain unanswered. While Lionel stops writing, David remains stubbornly in his thoughts as he pursues his musical career.

We see Lionel at all stages of his life. As a child, Lionel is played by Leo Cocovinis and as an old man by Chris Cooper. In the intervening period Paul Mescal plays Lionel and he does so with assurance as he covers the different aspects of Lionel’s life at the hard physical work on the farm in Kansas, the very different work as an aspiring professsional singer, conductor and composer, as a dutiful son to a widowed mother, as an eligible young man at Oxford but most importantly as the lover of David. These varied and diverse aspects of Lionel’s life, Mescal captures with complete assurance. He is a master of his craft.  O’Connor has less variety to play as David, but he appears as a young man of quiet confidence who is entranced not only by Lionel’s musical gifts but by him sexually as well. He is reserved, mesmerising, and it is easy to understand how Lionel succumbed to his charms. Mescal and O’Connor are both outstanding actors, and together here they are marvellous to watch, particularly in their song gathering enterprise in Maine.  But that said, when Lionel and David meet, one is in his late teens and the other in his early twenties. Mescal is in his late twenties, and O’Connor is in his mid-thirties. For all their skilful acting ability, that reality is not overcome.

The supporting cast of Emma Canning as Lionel’s Oxford girlfriend and Molly Price as Lionel’s mother add ballast to the personality that is Lionel. Also, Cooper as Lionel in old age is entirely convincing. There is not a false note to be heard.

The chronological telling of the story with flashbacks is captivatingly related, and the muted colours in which the actors are dressed are subtle and lends itself to a time which at one level may have been gentler. But at another level, it was conformist, restrictive and highly judgmental. Lionel and David were both stunted by that society, and it determined the course of their lives both together and apart.

The themes of this film inevitably raise comparisons with Brokeback Mountain (2005), but Lionel and David live in a more cerebral world. For all its visual strengths and the sheer excellence of the acting, the film, in some strange way, which is difficult to define, was a touch underwhelming. That may be because the expectations were unrealistic. However, since leaving the cinema, the story of Lionel and David, and the complexities of their lives, continues to resonate.