In 1917, two young music students attending the Boston Conservatory bond over a mutual love of folk music. They reconnect a few years later, embarking on a song-collecting trip in the backwaters of Maine.
Rated 5.0 / 5 from 1 log on Katalog
Not for the first time, I find myself thinking the world would be better served if the movie-marketing industry had never spawned. The History of Sound makes that painfully clear. It was marketed as a transgressive queer love story—two men in 1920s America, pitched on heat, scandal, and provocation. That framing doesn’t just miss the point; it actively flattens what the film is doing. Because the movie itself is a melancholy, gorgeous piece of art with very little to do with sex and everything to do with love. It feels almost like a play on screen: intimate, deliberate, soaked in beauty and authentic emotion, and restrained in a way that reads as true rather than timid. Lionel feels about seventeen in Boston, yet Mescal is nearly thirty and looks it—something the film’s dreamy tone makes easy to accept. This is storytelling that asks you to live inside feeling instead of demanding realism, and it earns that trust. What I appreciate most is that the film doesn’t want to shock. It doesn’t posture. It doesn’t reach for transgression. I like loud, camp, confrontational queer art as much as anyone—there’s a place for the spitting-in-the-eye of heteronormativity—but quiet, aching dignity is its own kind of radical. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, not all stories need to be sharpening themselves against the disapproval of the straights. Sometimes we can just enjoy a quiet, beautifully shot piece about yearning and love and loss and music. I don’t think they could have pulled this off with anyone else. As much as I’m generally a fan of Mescal, Josh O’Connor is the standout here. He gives a performance so open and unforced that it would fail to move only the hardest of hearts.
