leavetakings and lies
by
Douglas Messerli
Ben
Shattuck (screenplay, based on his book The History of Sound), Oliver
Hermanus (director) The History of Sound / 2025
I
saw this film with my husband Howard early in its theater run rather than
waiting for it to appear on Mubi, and both of us quite enjoyed it. Yet, by a
few days later when I began this review I realized that my enthusiasm had
somewhat waned, and that I wanted to love it far more desperately than I was
critically able to.
That is not say that Oliver Hermanus’ film
was not emotionally moving or, perhaps even more important, given the film’s
focus, that it was not a truly educative resource of American folk music.
Beginning
in the central character’s Kentucky youth, we are told that the young boy
Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) has grown up with perfect pitch and the gift (or
curse as some might describe it) of synesthesia, where he perceives music as an
experience of color, taste, and touch as well as sound. He also possesses a
beautiful singing voice, encouraged by the Appalachian musical traditions, and which,
through help of a local teacher, allows him entry in 1917 into the New England
Conservatory, at which point Shattuck seems to forget, at least in the script,
all about his apt pupil’s special talents.
Once there, after apparently only a brief
time, Lionel has already made numerous drinking friends and one night encounters
the man who will change his life, David White (Josh O’Connor), a born academic
before he actually become one, who seems to know nearly everything about
American folk music.
In fact, it is as he plays in the bar a
song which Lionel knows from his youth, that draws the young man to him, and
before you know it, Lionel is singing out the lyrics of "Silver
Dagger," to teach the soon-to-be teacher a new song:
Don't
sing love songs; you'll wake my mother
She's
sleeping here, right by my side
And
in her right hand, a silver dagger
She
says that I can't be your bride.
All
men are false, says my mother
They'll
tell you wicked, lovin' lies
The
very next evening, they'll court another
Leave
you alone to pine and sigh.
My
daddy is a handsome devil
He's
got a chain five miles long
And
on every link a heart does dangle
Of
another maid he's loved and wronged.
Go
court another tender maiden
And
hope that she will be your wife
For
I've been warned and I've decided
To
sleep alone all of my life.
At least that’s the version we know today
through Joan Baez. Lionel sings a slightly more sad or raw version with which
he’s grown up. But if he teaches David a new song, it is the latter who shows
him some tricks as the two retire to White’s apartment, half-drunk, playing
water games (of the kind that emanate from the mouth, not the penis), and
before you know it have fallen into each other’s arms, this time with their
cocks involved.
How the Kentucky boy has become so adaptable
to what in 1917 would be recognized as a true sexual deviation in such a short
time is not explained. But it is clearly love at first sight, the two men sharing
not only music but the bodies through which that music is expressed. We simply
have to presume that, unlike most of today’s young movie characters, Lionel was
a quick learner with little sexual guilt.
There is hardly time, however, for the plot
to thicken or their love to simmer before the War calls up David, Lionel being
too near-sighted for him to serve. After the couple make their sad leave-taking,
the Kentucky boy scurries back from the now near empty Conservatory to his
boyhood home, there to find much he still loves, including his mother (Molly
Price) and a friendly father (Raphael Sbarge) the latter of whom, however, soon
after dies, leaving the hard work of farming on his son’s now slightly
resentful shoulders.
Fortunately, White has returned safely from
the War, basically of sound mind—although we later discover he is seriously
suffering from what today we would describe as Post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD)—and, as he explains, has received a small grant to travel through the wilds
of Maine to record the rural folk music that still remains mostly in the
coastal regions. He intends to catalogue and preserve that music on wax cylinders, transcribing the songs’ lyrics by hand. He gives
his friend and place a date and demands he be there to join him: “Meet me Jan.
1 at the Augusta Train Station.”
Actually, we later discover, it’s all a ruse; there is no grant, no
institutional support. The fairly well-off and sophisticated David has simply
cooked up a way to return to the love-making that he and Lionel had just begun before
the War cut it short.
It is this “on the road” part of the
movie, with the two of them camping out together as they trek through the
woodlands of Maine that makes up the longest part of this film, and creates the
deep bonds—and sexual frisson—between the two as well as presenting the film’s
audience with a small anthology of folk music.
I love folk music a great deal, and as
Lionel later argues as a musicologist, it represents the true heart of the common
man. I spent the entire year of 2004 gathering the lyrics of just such an
anthology of my popular folk favorites of the US from the 19th Century (Listen
to the Mockingbird: American Folksongs and Popular Music Lyrics of the 19th
Century), so arguably I have proven my allegiance to the form. But the
songs presented in this film, although many of them quite lovely, sound all too
much alike and are understandably performed by amateur individuals, the aged,
the very young, and the special in these rural communities, not always the best
interpreters of the works.
At
the same time, the love between the two men is so hidden and attenuated in this
film that it makes Brokeback Mountain look a bit like an out and
in-your-face porn film. This grand gay tour comes off more like the faded
pictures of a scrapbook than a record of these two handsome beings lusting in a tented
outdoors. Despite the rather colorful lives lived by both musicians, the movie
itself appears most often to have been filmed through a lens that wiped away
the very elements of synesthesia that Lionel claims to experience. As Variety’s
Owen Gleiberman describes it: “The film is quite handsome, full of woodsy earth
tones and dark clothing, without any bright colors to get in the way of the
meditative gloom.”
Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian,
nicely summarizes my overall feelings:
“Oliver
Hermanus’s The History of Sound has admirers in Cannes; but I couldn’t
help finding it an anaemic, laborious, achingly tasteful film, originally a
short story by Ben Shattuck which has become a quasi-Brokeback Mountain
film whose tone is one of persistent mournful awe at its own sadness.
Hermanus has made great movies in the past
including Beauty and Living [and I’d add the 2018 film Moffie]
but this is a film that is almost petrified by its own upmarket values,
paralysed under the varnish of classiness.
It’s about two young men in early
20th-century America, a singer and an academic musicologist, who…hike around
the hills and backwoods of rural Maine, meeting local people and recording
their authentic folk songs on wax cylinders, sleeping under the stars and
falling in love.
… Mescal and O’Connor are of course very
talented actors and they never do anything other than an impeccable
professional job but they have each shown more passion in, variously, Andrew
Haigh’s All of Us Strangers [Mescal] and Francis Lee’s God’s Own
Country [O’Connor].”
Part of the story, obviously, is that
although they do truly love one another, there are problems that remain unspoken
between them, and that tension is what forces both to remain relatively
cautious in their passion, particularly David who apparently is far more
conscious than Lionel of the way society might describe their love. Lionel, on
the other hand, is angry for what he perceives as David’s lack of political
commitment, particularly when they visit a community that is being closed down
by the police so that wealthy men might use the land for their own purposes.
When they encounter the police camped out in the woods on their way to the
small village they have just left,
David does everything he can do but actually vanish from their sight, shirking
any sense of responsibility to the lovely people they have just visited and
recorded.
The differences in their personality,
however, might still heal, one imagines, if they were given enough time, but
this film is actually a story of leave-takings, a betrayal of those who one has
come to love or, perhaps, pretended to. And it is soon time, in this part of
the film, for David to return to his teaching at Bowdoin College, and for
Lionel, following his lover’s advice, to travel off to Europe.
If David has already left Lionel behind
twice, once to go off to War and now to return to the college which he attempts
to convince his friend is not a place where he would feel comfortable, the
next third of this somewhat over-long film, focuses on Lionel’s serial
abandonments, first of
the
America he so loves, second of the Italy where he sings a very different kind
of music in a renowned choral group and has taken up with a gay Italian boy,
Luca, as his lover to whom he simply announces that he’s decided to take a job
as a conductor at the University of Oxford.
Once Lionel has relocated to England, a young socialite,
Clarissa Roux (Emma Canning) quickly falls in love with him, and is all
ready to whisk him off to the altar, but first must seek out the approval of
her very wealthy but Bohemian-style parents (Emily Bergl and Michael D.
Xavier). On a visit from Lionel to their mansion, they quickly approve, but the
young Kentuckian now is beginning to have his doubts about turning
straight, particularly since he walks the nights in memory of his time on the
near-freezing ground with David. The cold stone floors of the Roux
mansion can’t compare. The receipt of a message that his grandfather has died
makes for an easy excuse to return to Kentucky to pick up the pieces for his
ailing mother, as he quickly kisses his eager would-be wife goodbye forever.
Back in Appalachia he discovers that he’s
too late to help his mother, since she too has died, their modest shack having almost
rotted away and now is literally blowing in the wind. After a brief meet up
with an old acquaintance, now married, the itinerant Lionel heads off to
Bowdoin to reconnect with his true love.
Once there, however, he discovers a
reality that he (and the film’s viewers) might never have imagined. His beloved
David has died several years ago, so announces a senior professor who was
Department Chairman in David’s tenure. What’s more, the college never
commissioned or offered to pay for David’s tour of the Maine coast. No one has
any knowledge of wax cylinders. Perhaps, the professor suggests Lionel might
want to contact David’s widow Belle (Hadley Robinson) about the existence of
such recordings.
Even more startling than his death and
marriage, is the youthful age of David’s wife whom he met and married when she was a
15-year-old teenager, who tells Lionel of her husband's sufferings after returned from
the trenches and his basic abandonment of her. She makes it clear that the
cause of David’s death was suicide, and reports she has read all of Lionel’s unanswered
letters, now strangely relieved to actually meet him.
She, herself, has remarried and has a
child for which she interrupts this dreadful communication several times. She hands
Lionel back his letters, and assures him that he is free to look in the attic
for the cylinders.
In short, David has betrayed Lionel time
and again, having lied about full sexuality, his life at Bowdoin, and his own purposes
for the trip into the Maine wilds. He has also kept Lionel in the dark about
the horrors that he himself was suffering from his experiences in wartime
Europe.
This time, we fully understand Lionel’s
quick leave-taking without checking the attic for the fruits of musical
endeavors.
I admit that all of what Bradshaw
describes as Lionel’s “long goodbye” is sad and painful, even occasionally drawing
tears from these tired eyes. But it is difficult after the series of endless
lies both told to one another and themselves to fully share in their obvious
longing to share one another’s lives. For both there were just too many
barriers between them, country boy and sophisticated rich kid, for them to really
share their lives together.
Like so many movies with queer characters
of the past, this film kills off the weaker of the two gay men and turns the
other into a kind of transformed (we might even describe him as “converted”)
individual. In the final scenes Lionel (played by Chris Cooper) has ceased
being a man who’s lost his one true same-sex lover, having become a noted ethnomusicologist
who in an TV-interview shares his passion for folk music, as well as for classical,
pop, and other forms of sound. And guess what? Belle has found those wax
cylinders, and seeing him on TV, packed them up and shipped them to him.
Inside he finds a special one addressed to
him: the voice being that of David’s who rather ineffectually explains that he
has never come back to life after fighting in the war, apologizing to and
thanking Lionel for his time and passion, signing off with the song, this sung in
his own voice, “Silver Dagger.”
The movie plot, accordingly, was also a
sort of ruse, a come-on trying to attract us to watch a film filled with a
then-nameless love and significant forgotten and now-lost songs, neither of
which it even pretends to deliver, the writer and director knowing all along that this was an
impossibility given the American culture in which their characters had been
nurtured and in which they attempted to exist.
Los
Angeles, September 22, 2025
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).
