Early this month I confessed to being a little bit concerned about seeing Oliver Hermanus and Ben Shattuck‘s The History of Sound, a period gay romance starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.
I wasn’t exactly afraid of any chowing-down scenes, but I knew I’d be a wee bit antsy about anything too graphic. I mainly wanted The History of Sound to be as good as Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer, but I knew this would be a tall order.
I emerged from a Debussy press screening of The History of Sound about an hour ago, and my initial reaction, much to my surprise, was “where’s the vitality…the primal passion?”
I’m not saying I wanted to see Mescal lick up more cum droplets (as he did in All Of Us Strangers), but there hasn’t been a more earnestly delicate, suppressive, bordering-on-bloodless film about erotic entanglement since David Lean‘s A Passage to India (’84) and before that Alfred Hitchcock‘s Marnie(’64).
Come to think of it, Marnie at least has that one scene when Sean Connery rips off Tippi Hedren‘s bathrobe, leaving her buck naked.
A History of Sound delivers a welcomely non-graphic sex scene early on, but that’s all she wrote.
The History of Sound is a gay romance made for older straight guys like me, I suppose, but even I was thinking “Jesus, I never thought I’d complain about this thing being too tasteful and hemmed in.”
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has called it “listless and spiritually inexpressive…Brokeback Mountain on sedatives.”
The heart of the film is when lovers Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) go hiking around rural Maine in boots and backpacks and carrying a wax cylinder sound-recording device, the idea being to record rural types singing folk tunes.
Except this happens in the winter months, and if you’ve ever been to Maine between December and late April…well, c’mon! Not to mention the lack of bathtubs or showers on such a trek, which means smelly feet and gunky crotch aromas after a few days. Who the hell would do such a thing? During the summer maybe…
O’Connor’s role is smaller than Mescal’s but the former exerts more feeling somehow…more command. Mescal’s Lionel is supposed to be a native Kentuckian, but he doesn’t sound or look country-ish. (Imagine if he’d played Lionel in the manner of Gary Cooper‘s Alvin York, who hailed from Tennessee around the same time.)
Mescal is basically playing a master of emotional constipation who doesn’t behave in a manner that suggests “1920s gay guy”…he’s very, very committed to keeping it all buttoned inside…the relationship with O’Connor’s David is highly charged and drilled, and yet they part company and Lionel moves to Italy and then England to teach music.
And then, while in England, Lionel flirts with the idea of being in love with with Emma Canning‘s Clarissa, a to-the-manor-born British lass who seems to love him unconditionally, only to blow their relationship off in order to return to Maine and possibly hook up with David again.
Which is totally nuts, of course. There was no percentage in living an openly gay life in the 1920s, so the smart move for Lionel would have been to marry wealthy Clarissa and, in the manner of Heath Ledger‘s camping trips with Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, visit O’Connor for annual vacations and whatnot.