Past lives: "The History of Sound"

When one thinks of the musicologist Alan Lomax, touring the American hinterlands in the middle decades of the 20th century to find, record and preserve the folk songs passed down from one generation to the next, one tends to imagine a somewhat solitary endeavour: a man, a knapsack, some doubtless rudimentary recording equipment. (In fact, documents show Lomax embarked on several such song-gathering missions in good company, including with his first and second wives.) The History of Sound, the latest film from the South African wanderer Oliver Hermanus (Beauty, Moffie, Living), proposes something more romantic - and tragic - yet: two queer men pursuing a similar path, who set out on their own expedition in post-WW1 America and find a connection through music that they struggle to maintain amid the more prosaic business of everyday life. David (Josh O'Connor) and Lionel (Paul Mescal) meet as students at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1917, bonding over an old song around the piano. (David plays, Lionel sings.) These are solitary-seeming men - when David invites Lionel back to his place, they have to share the one usable cup - who begin to plough an obscure furrow, determining to record American folk songs on wax cylinders for future study. That cup isn't the only thing the pair come to share over the two hours of Hermanus' film: as well as an interest, David and Lionel share a certain sensitivity, a tent, several nights together in the woods, and the burdens of passing into and hearing out a world at war. But this was early 20th century America, where sustained harmony between two gay men was difficult, if not impossible. Going solo, in this instance, may well have been the easier option.

Even before Hermanus - working from two short stories by the the author and nature boy Ben Shattuck - conspires to keep his leads apart for long stretches (like I said: solitary men), it's clear The History of Sound isn't the film the Internet's more excitable denizens would have wanted for their current boyfriends Mescal and O'Connor. Hermanus is once again trading in restraint, delicacy, in quiet, noble, dignified suffering; anybody coming this way in the hope of witnessing lusty bum fun would be more usefully rerouted towards the Heated Rivalry boxset. This is a film that knows but two seasons - autumn and winter, leaving the rending of garments unlikely at best - and where the soundtrack shuffles between two states: poignant silences and old, sad songs. (The more of the latter our boys collect together, the deeper in they get.) The key line actually isn't a lyric, rather the young David reminding Lionel early on in their courtship that everyone he knows will some day die: Shattuck and Hermanus immediately stamp this relationship with an expiration date - as Living did Bill Nighy's terminally ill functionary - while also raising the hope that some vibration, some trace, will live on into the present, much as these songs have done. You can understand why the Mescal and O'Connor fanbases have been far less vocal about History than they have about these newly ubiquitous actors' other awards-season contenders: Hermanus has taken two of the western world's notionally hotter male performers and tipped several pails of cold water over their heads. You come away from the film experiencing not the vapours, but a lingering chill of mortality.

And yet the film has virtues besides. As shot by Alexander Dynan (First Reformed), it's classically handsome - almost as notable an illustration of what can be done on an indie budget as The Brutalist was - if by definition muted. (At least as muted as the reaction.) Instead of happiness, we get melancholy; the palette consists of two shades, brown and beige. At its centre, there stand two men tamping down every feeling they have until it's too late, who remain on some level strangers to themselves; the music is a form of expression to which they personally don't seem to have access, so it's no surprise they covet these songs as they do. (Contemporary onlookers may well be reminded of those vinyl junkies who will go to the ends of the earth to track down a rare album, but who can't seem to talk to their immediate loved ones.) Mescal and O'Connor make for a pretty credible match here, offering distinct notes to the film much as Lionel and David sing in different keys on their walks through the woods, and Hadley Robinson - a new face to me - is mightily touching as the third party who fills in some of the narrative gaps as History pans out. The film can't reach the expressive heights of this decade's strongest period romance, Mona Fastvold's The World to Come, which opened up the possibility of queer joy and delight, to potential liberation; an extended coda, featuring an actor you may not have seen for some while and a more resonant Eighties needledrop than anything in Marty Supreme, suggests neither Shattuck nor Hermanus really knew how and where to end it. Still, it's largely absorbing and textured viewing, and the one Paul Mescal film this season where the abundant craft feels fully and attentively inhabited: this history is lived-in, just briefly and unhappily, as so many lives of this particular period surely would have been.

The History of Sound is now showing in selected cinemas.