Spoilers Ahead.
I mentioned that there were other gay-themed projects aside from Heated Rivalry in recent release that I was interested in seeing. Foremost among them was The History of Sound, which got very positive press after it screened at Cannes last year. I watched it this weekend, and I was disappointed by it. It won't be available on home video until late March, so I'm nervous about giving away too much about it. I'll keep my comments general for a paragraph or two. If you want to see it without preconceptions, you should stop reading now.
The History of Sound is, I admit, very well produced and acted, as you can tell from the trailer I started off with here. It's the story of two young men who meet in 1915 and immediately fall in love over their shared love of traditional ballads. They spend three months traveling around Maine, seeking out people to collect songs from. They record these songs on wax cylinders, a cutting-edge recording technology of the period. Afterward they are separated by circumstances; one stays on to teach music, the other goes to Europe and becomes a choral performer. They fall out of touch. The one who went to Europe drifts from relationship to relationship, but returns to his home farm in Kentucky when his mother dies. They never reunite, but one becomes a famous ethnomusicologist and in 1980 is ultimately reunited with the long-lost wax cylinders he and his love collected so many years before.
That ending prevents The History of Sound from becoming the kind of breakout romance Heated Rivalry is now. Mass audiences generally want happy endings for their love stories. I do too, but I'm not rigid about it. My objections to The History of Sound are about other aspects of the film.
I got the impression from the first publicity I encountered that The History of Sound was based on an actual, historical pair of song collectors. I soon found out that I was mistaken: it's based on short stories by one Ben Shattuck, who wrote the screenplay. Fair enough; I'm always frustrated by movies that are "based on," or worse, "inspired by a true story," because I want to know what liberties were taken with the true story, and usually they negatively affect the result; so I didn't have to worry about that here.
Still, I was bothered by numerous things, not all of them strictly historical. That song-collecting trip through Maine in winter, for one. There's no snow at all, the guys sleep outside in a tent. For another, the Maine landscape looks exactly like the Kentucky landscape where the film begins. For yet another, the narrator, Lionel (played by Paul Mescal) tells us at the beginning that he has synesthesia - he not only hears but sees and tastes sound -- and perfect pitch. The synesthesia doesn't play a role in the rest of the movie, though there are a couple of random scenes where Lionel goes into a rapture when someone else plays music; at other times he has no such reaction.
The two young men don't seem to have any misgivings about their forbidden love, except for one flashback late in the story where David (Josh O'Connor) asks Lionel if he has any. Lionel says no. This doesn't strike me as anachronistic: sometimes same-sex lovers didn't feel bad about their love because they didn't realize they were Sodomites or Sapphists, or were just good at denial. Contrariwise, a good many same-sex lovers in our liberated times still feel paralyzing guilt. O'Connor and Mescal turn in fine performance, the love scenes make it clear that Lionel and David are committing acts that in the day could have sent them to prison; my complaint is not about The History of Sound as queer cinema.
More important historically, I took for granted at first that David and Lionel, or at least the filmmakers, knew that they were only two of many song collectors. The research didn't begin with the invention of recording technology either. But as the film went on, I got the impression that it was treating them as lone pioneers, culminating in the 1980 TV interview with Lionel at the very end, touting his book on the subject as some sort of towering revelation. I grew up on the 1950s and 1960s "folk revival," not just the Weavers and the Kingston Trio or Bob Dylan and Joan Baez but Alan Lomax's big books of traditional songs and numerous old-time musicians like Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten who re-emerged in old age from obscurity to become stars of the folk festival circuit. My favorite account is Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard, 1997), but there are many others.
The film's focus on a few ballads seemed off to me as well. If there were few black people in New England before WWI, other song collectors went after not only the next variant of "Barbara Allen" but "Negro" spirituals, work songs, and the like - not to mention dance music, shape-note hymns, and much more. I don't think I believe that an experienced song collector like David (as a boy he'd traveled to England with his uncle to find songs) would not have known "Silver Dagger" in 1915; it was made famous by Joan Baez in the 1960s, but its origins - in England! - were well-known. Someone, I think, was stretching for a meet-cute moment to bring Lionel and David together. It may work for many viewers of the film who don't know anything about folk ballads, but I thought it hung far too much on a slender thread.
As a result of that interview, Lionel receives the box of thirty-seven wax cylinders that he and David recorded so long before. It seems anti-climactic to me. I like low-key films, but it's possible to be too low-key. The leads' performances sustain the film, but they're not enough to make it hold together. I agreed with the Guardian's review, which I found only after I'd thought out this post:
This is a film about music as well as love, but the folk songs, for which Mescal and O’Connor gamely fabricate enthusiasm, sound like museum pieces kept under glass and the love story itself feels as if it is kept under glass. The accents and line-readings feel like painstaking expert reconstructions rather than the real thing and the love scenes are at half-throttle – as if they are there to be remembered sadly rather than experienced ecstatically in the here and now.
I repeat, I was disappointed by The History of Sound. It's a labor of love by all concerned, but it falls flat for me.
