The Muted, Melancholy Synesthetics of “The History of Sound”

In “The History of Sound,” a new romantic drama set during and after the First World War, passion is an intensely private thing, and in more ways than you might expect. Love and desire are not simply expressed in the sweaty vigor of bodies in bed; the two central characters are turned on, and brought together, by moments of quietly harmonious convergence, rooted in shared qualities of heightened perception, cultivated taste, and specialized knowledge. A crucial early scene takes place in 1917, where Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal), a voice student at the New England Conservatory of Music, is out drinking with friends. Suddenly, amid waves of cigarette smoke and chatter, he hears a song that he recognizes: “Across the Rocky Mountain,” an old folk ballad that he learned while growing up on a farm in Kentucky. It’s not the kind of tune that pops up every day at a Boston bar, and Lionel is immediately interested in the singer: David White (Josh O’Connor), another student at the conservatory.

What happens next is essentially a case of love at first listen. Here are two young men bonding over a shared devotion to American folk music, which, born out of rural oral traditions excluded from their academic milieu, seem mired in obscurity. David, blessed with O’Connor’s elfin, mischievous smile, is an impulsive fellow and a suave multitasker: he can sing, play the piano, and dangle a cigarette from his lips with rakish allure. Lionel is shyer and quieter, but Mescal—peering through thin, owlish glasses that have a way of both concealing and amplifying his magnetism—employs the character’s reserve to stealthy effect. When Lionel, playfully goaded by David, sings “Silver Dagger,” a folk tune about a young woman trying to heed her mother’s mistrust of men, his voice rings out in the smoky, now silent bar with a clarity that touches the sublime.

Lionel’s singing ability is one of two gifts that he’s cultivated since boyhood. The other is that Lionel can see sound. In an opening voice-over, an older version of Lionel, played by Chris Cooper, describes his surprise at learning that few other people can. “I thought everyone could see sound. Yellow for D,” he says. “Taste, too. My father would play a B-minor and my mouth went bitter.” For most of us, sound is invisible, and the movie suggests that Lionel and David’s immediate mutual attraction is largely invisible, too—except, perhaps, to those few attuned to the same wavelength. As the two men tumble into bed, and into the depths of a physically, emotionally, and intellectually thrilling romance, it’s as if their devotion to music, an inherently isolating endeavor, had somehow inoculated them against the dangers of public exposure. It’s not that their love dare not speak its name; it’s that few others would recognize the name if it were spoken, or would even begin to understand the language.

Although Lionel’s experience of sound is never identified onscreen, he has what is commonly known as synesthesia, in which certain stimuli trigger more than one sensory response. (The New Yorker’s Robin Wright, writing from personal experience, has described the condition as “a kind of neurological crosstalk.”) More than a few movies have evoked the experience of synesthesia, some by chance, some through a deliberate attempt to reproduce its effects. In the 1940 Walt Disney classic “Fantasia,” an army of animators sought out visual correlatives for the contours of classical music—mostly with clearly illustrative narrative imagery but also with inventive bursts of pure abstraction. Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love,” from 2002, features lyrical interludes in which a color band fills the screen, each surging note of Jon Brion’s score seeming to correspond to a different hue.

In “The History of Sound,” the South African-born director Oliver Hermanus shows little interest in such bold displays of cinematic impressionism. The film has a spare, chilly beauty. Its most striking compositions are of forests and farms, which the cinematographer Alexander Dynan shoots in a wintry, desaturated palette dominated by pale grays and parched browns. If there are intense or vibrant colors here, they remain locked away in the vault of Lionel’s consciousness—a vault that, snippets of voice-over notwithstanding, Hermanus has no intention of breaking into too easily. His discretion extends to the depiction of David and Lionel’s affair. The men’s first instance of lovemaking consists of some droll foreplay—David, an instinctive trickster, spits a stream of water at Lionel’s face—and an almost businesslike invitation (“Come on”), followed by a quick, tasteful cut to the morning after.

There’s little sense of hesitation, danger, or risk, which is initially refreshing; you sense that Hermanus wants his characters to live and love, at least in the moment, without fear. But the romance also proceeds with a curious lack of sensual discovery and enveloping excitement—and certainly none of the fireworks that attended O’Connor’s work in “God’s Own Country” (2017) or Mescal’s performance in “All of Us Strangers” (2023), to name two gay romances of wrenching, lingering emotional power. In “The History of Sound,” David and Lionel tumble into and out of each other’s arms with an almost perfunctory concision, as if even the heights of their romantic ecstasy were a pleasure too isolated and rarefied for the audience to partake in. In time, the First World War brings their conservatory studies and their relationship to an abrupt halt: David is drafted and sent overseas, and Lionel, spared by his weak eyesight, returns to Kentucky to help his parents (Raphael Sbarge and Molly Price) tend the family farm. But even here, the ache of the lovers’ separation registers with only a muffled sense of melancholy. The camera keeps us on the outside, looking in.

When “The History of Sound” premièred, earlier this year, at Cannes, critics likened it, mostly unfavorably, to “Brokeback Mountain,” Ang Lee’s drama from 2005. The conflations may ultimately say less about any demerits in Hermanus’s film than they do about the enduring greatness of Lee’s, and also about the dispiriting absence of another starry gay romance of comparable cultural impact. Even so, it’s clear enough what prompted these parallels. To dispense with the most superficial similarities, both films are feats of artful narrative expansion: “Brokeback Mountain” was drawn from an Annie Proulx short story, and “The History of Sound” was adapted, by Ben Shattuck, from his short story of the same name. Both films sparked excitement for casting two acclaimed and popular male actors as romantic leads; in the case of Hermanus’s movie, the pairing of Mescal and O’Connor served to renew a debate about the long-standing but increasingly frowned-upon practice of having straight actors play gay roles—a critique that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, the stars of “Brokeback Mountain,” didn’t have to confront to the same degree.

What unites the two films, more deeply, is their understanding of love as something that can be most fully expressed, experienced, perfected, and liberated out in nature, far from society’s judgmental eyes. In 1919, David, back from the war and teaching in Maine, invites Lionel to join him that winter on a university-funded research project to collect folk songs. And so they proceed to travel on foot through the woods of Maine, using an Edison phonograph and a collection of wax cylinders to preserve the voices and tunes they encounter along the way.