‘The History of Sound’ Review: Echoes of a Fragile Romance (MUBI)

British emotional reserve is a well-worn subject, and films like The History of Sound serve as case studies for a particular way of seeing and approaching the world of feelings. Curiously, Olivier Hermanus — the director, and something of a specialist in characters whose mix of dignity and modesty often prevents them from expressing what they feel in public — is South African. But in films like this one or his previous Living — a remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru transplanted to England — he has turned himself into a filmmaker defined by protagonists who would rather swallow their emotions whole than put them into words.

That personality type is usually effective onscreen; movies like The Remains of the Day — and many from the Merchant/Ivory duo — used it beautifully. Hermanus, however, goes one step further. He doesn’t just craft emotionally reserved characters: he drenches the entire film in that tone. It’s as if the world itself had been lightly sprayed with a substance that prevents anyone from expressing anything openly. Or perhaps, who knows, the government has banned it.

As in Living, Hermanus sets a pace and a silence the viewer has to adapt to. And here, thanks to Paul Mescal’s empathetic-but-discreet performance, you gradually tune into his long and tangled emotional trajectory. The Aftersun actor — once again playing a man defined by silences and a kind of built-in, slow-burn melancholy — plays Lionel, who grows up poor on a Kentucky farm but with an unusual musical gift: synesthesia (or, more specifically, chromesthesia), which allows him to see colors when he hears sounds.

Gifted with a remarkable voice — and with a father who was also a musician — Lionel earns a place at the Boston Conservatory of Music in 1917. That’s where he meets David (the ubiquitous and wildly talented Josh O’Connor), another young student whose background couldn’t be more different: a wealthy kid studying and performing the same folk songs Lionel knows from lived experience. And it’s through those traditional tunes — passed down orally, generation after generation — that the two connect. Lionel sings one David doesn’t know. Then another. They look at each other with mounting intensity. Before long, we’re staring at the early contours of another potential Brokeback Mountain.

The History of Sound charts this stop-and-start relationship, with the two men coming together and drifting apart, sometimes because of public events (David goes to fight in the First World War) and sometimes for reasons that Lionel can’t quite grasp. The defining moment — the one that cements their bond and gives it its own quiet epic dimension — is a trip they take across various American towns recording local residents and amateur singers on a (then-brand-new) phonograph, preserving folk songs of uncertain origin. Like Alan Lomax or his peers, Lionel and David set out to collect the melodies that shaped a nation — and in the process, they build a delicate, fragile love story.

Hermanus focuses on the romance, without ever abandoning the reticence, modesty and restraint that define both his characters and his cinema. Later, the film follows Lionel as he tries to reconnect with the love of his life, discovering — long before the invention of the telephone, let alone cell phones or email — that it won’t be easy. And not only that: Lionel also realizes that every subsequent relationship, whether with men or women, only deepens his anguish and nostalgia. In its patient, melancholy, quietly sorrowful way, The History of Sound may not convey all the emotions coursing through its protagonist, but it does pull the viewer into the same slow-motion agony that keeps him from rebuilding his life beyond David.

The film is tidy, beautiful, distant, and crafted with a precision that mirrors its protagonist’s demeanor. In that sense, the narrative mode feels coherent with Lionel’s personality. Still, that choice produces a kind of restrained stillness that becomes somewhat alienating — colder than it should be in a film ostensibly driven by overwhelming emotions. In some scenes — one involving a woman Lionel meets while searching for David, and others where we hear the collected or performed folk songs — The History of Sound finds the right balance between reticence and pain, modesty and catharsis. But those moments are rare. For most of its two hours, the film seems content to function as a museum of its own emotions.