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The Dull Flame of Desire
By Matthew Eng

The History of Sound
Dir. Oliver Hermanus, U.K./U.S./Sweden/Italy, MUBI

The promise of Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in a historical queer romance seemed engineered as if by AI to spike the collective libido of the terminally online before we all scrolled down to the latest Pedro Pascal cover shoot. But maybe some pairings are better left in the mind’s eye. The resulting film, Oliver Hermanus’s adaptation of Ben Shattuck’s misty-eyed short story "The History of Sound," initially brings its stars together in a smoky, ocherous Boston pub as Mescal’s Lionel, a bashful, Kentucky-bred vocalist at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1917, is spellbound by the ivory-tickling of O’Connor’s David. The latter is an impish and orphaned composition student with a penchant for the sort of esoteric folk ballads that Lionel has seldom heard outside the Bluegrass State. David, amused by his classmate’s eagerness, quickly coaxes him into recital and, by night’s end, his bed.

From there, the two become an enamored and inseparable item, their love affair secreted in the walls of David’s walk-up apartment. The taboo nature of their relationship is treated with casual, shameless indifference and no torment of the “I wish I knew how to quit you” variety. (“I didn't experience the guilt that some men in my time would have,” Lionel muses in Shattuck’s original story. “I just loved David, and I didn't think much beyond that.”) But it is revealing of the film’s circumspection that the pair’s first sexual encounter is entirely omitted, as it is in the text, save for a cutesy pseudo-seduction that plays out over a shared glass of water. Aside from a handful of brief couplings rendered as if by contractual stipulation from the shoulders up, there is little sexual intimacy or intensity that follows this initial hookup, a dispiriting choice that Hermanus has attempted to justify with the revelatory assertion that “queer people, gay people, can have relationships that are more than just hookups.” Mescal, also a producer on the project, offered a similar sentiment at Cannes, where the film premiered in competition, by arguing that the central relationship privileges “intellectual stimulation” over “physical touch.” If only the intellectual stimulation was present on screen.

Surely we agree that a gay love story does not require explicit boffing in order to be affecting, compelling, or fundamentally queer. The courtly sexuality of the film’s stray, bare-chested make-out sessions is certainly a far cry from the sight of Mescal lapping up Andrew Scott’s cum in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (2023). But the defensiveness that one detects in Hermanus’s and Mescal’s comments—made in response to their film’s arguable sexlessness—says less about artistic choice and more about the thudding disappointment that their film has engendered since debuting on the Croisette; it is spin. The trouble with The History of Sound is not that its makers cannot imagine or depict these characters’ erotic bliss, however short-lived, in anything other than the most conservative terms, but that Hermanus, screenwriter Shattuck, and their leading men offer so little of conviction in its stead. A stuffy, staid air of politeness seeps into the frame from the film’s outset and never truly evaporates.

What follows is a decades-spanning chronicle of a relationship thwarted by numerous factors: David’s enlistment in the First World War and the shell shock he carries home; Lionel’s filial obligation to his small family of farmers; and, finally, the tight-lipped timidity of both men to pursue a life together. But the presumed crux of the film is a months-long project initiated by David under the auspices of the music department at Bowdoin College, where he has found a postwar position as teacher. At David’s behest, Lionel joins his former lover to traverse the American countryside and record its folk songs for posterity on wax phonograph cylinders, rekindling their romance in the great outdoors. These scenes and the performances they capture evince a pacific, twilit charm, but the songs themselves are granted much less screen time and critical consideration than they merit; their larger, contested contexts—the racial, regional, and ethnic lines along which this music been composed and spread—are afforded a dutiful glance and a feeble shrug. The ethics of this academic, magpie mission are as of little interest to Hermanus’s film as they are to Shattuck’s story, which nevertheless furnished an arresting scene or two, including a funereal encounter with a solitary widower still grateful to hear one of his favorite songs. On page and screen, the narrative ultimately belongs with frustrating exclusivity to Mescal’s Lionel, whom the film tracks in a series of unspeakably tedious passages as he abandons prestigious European posts and devoted paramours, both men and women, yearning all the while, it appears, for the rural home he abandoned and the true love he allowed to slip away.

Where this love might reside in The History of Sound is hard to discern. Mescal and O’Connor at times conjure a reflexive, soft-spoken tenderness, but more often they convey merely the mutual respect of fond coworkers who have never interacted outside the office. O’Connor first made waves as a brooding sheep farmer in Francis Lee’s deeply felt gay drama God’s Own Country (2017) and his confident, rascally verve made him easily the sharpest corner in the love triangle of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024), but he is increasingly peripheral in a film that cares more about his phantom presence than his flesh-and-blood one. Mescal has been primed, like his costar, as a generational talent, but the bone-deep sensitivity of his early performances has dissipated into musclebound anonymity. He approaches each plot strand here with a mien of bland, earnest affability meant to mask a torrent of feeling pending a third-act purging.

Just as dire is the Irish actor’s flat-voiced inability to overcome his miscasting as a down-home son of the American South—which isn’t to say that Mescal lacks the chops to have potentially outacted such a handicap; the British O’Connor, for his part, hardly fares better as a Northerner. One gets the sense that overexposure is gradually diminishing these actors’ respective allures, or that their capacity to credibly transform and shed the skin of the thirst-inducing celebrity thespian is too easily squandered by the more negligent directors in their midst. Perhaps these performances, circumspect to the point of woodenness, indicate the broader circulation and ongoing atrophy of the aesthetic inclination towards “emotional withdrawal or refusal” that Shonni Enelow identified in contemporary American movie acting of the 2010s. The risk-averse workmanship of these actors befits the joylessness of Hermanus’s treatment, but it also conforms to a certain mode of civility that accompanies the tragic, prestige-soliciting queer drama. Bill Nighy’s inherent, furrowed-brow gravitas enabled him to circumvent the starch of Hermanus’s previous effort Living (2022), a gratuitous update of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), and delicately braid together a well-wrinkled characterization of resolve and regret. Nighy was at least working with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro. Shattuck’s script does these actors no favors; the ellipses and evasions of Lionel and David’s conversations suggest the coyness of their conception, rather than unarticulated depths.

The comfortingly craggy voice of Chris Cooper, an infallible character actor in the Nighy mold, guides us in an intrusive narration that signals its literary origins; his physical presence as the elder Lionel in the epilogue lends the film a weightiness it has desperately needed—it is not too little, though it is far too late. Midway through the song-finding expedition, Lionel (via Cooper) reasons that “happiness isn’t a story,” a line lifted from Shattuck’s original work that apparently explains why a good deal of the couple’s glory days is glided over, manifesting in numbing, evanescing montages. But the drama that Hermanus and his collaborators have created thrives neither in happiness nor misery. Devoid of blood, bite, and the hum of internal chaos and discontent, this is a work that finally valorizes folk music as “emotion in song,” but fails to achieve its own intended emotions visually, verbally, and affectively; its inner life, like its ethnomusicology, remains frictionless to a fault. Beholding the anemically oppressive realism of The History of Sound, I found myself longing for even the most turgid of Hollywood melodramas—with their unchecked ardor, grandiloquent flourishes, and screen-piercing actorly gestures. What good is yet another glassy-eyed stare or lovelorn murmur when the flickers of passion have already been doused by the prevailing winds of respectability?