‘The History of Sound’ Review: Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor’s Tender Romance is a Silver Dagger to the Heart [A-] Cannes
“My grandfather once said that happiness isn’t a story.”
In the traditional folk song “Silver Dagger,” the lyrics go “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.” A dire warning if there ever was one but it’s also the siren call that draws Lionel (Paul Mescal) to David (Josh O’Connor) at the beginning of the new film from Oliver Hermanus, The History of Sound. David had never heard the song outside of his small Kentucky farm and here it was, coming out in dulcet tones from a handsome piano playing New Englander in 1917 Boston. In that moment Lionel’s world stops and his life truly begins.
Adapted from the short story by Ben Shattuck (who also wrote the screenplay), David is traveling and collecting songs and hymns as a hobby, Lionel is a scholarship kid at the Boston Conservatory when they meet just before America enters World War I. Coming from worlds apart – David was born in Newport but grew up in London and lived with his uncle after his parents died, Lionel only just now leaving his single room shack after his father passes. David is significantly more sophisticated than but never wields it that way and the pair hit it off. In a bar full of beer and whisky-swilling men, they’re the only two in the room. David, brazen and forward, asks Lionel to walk him home. The flirting continues, David spits water into Lionel’s mouth (very hot) and they have (unseen) sex.
When David is called to war and their time is cut short, Lionel gives him a note that says “Write. Send chocolate. Don’t die.” But upon his return, with great interest in David’s song-finding mission, joins him, and from a train station in Portland, Maine, the pair travel through the Northeast, traversing wilderness and the middle of nowhere to find and record the voices and songs of people on the fringes, the most modest of society, or truly outside of it.
You don’t have to be an ethnomusicologist to be enamored with the adventures Lionel and David go on in their journey to collect these folk ballads, recording them on wax cylinders (a format nearly 40 years in at the time). A stylus pushes into the wax and, when the cylinder is rotated, cuts a groove, David explains to a young boy before recording his siblings and mother. The stylus also moves up and down very slightly as it vibrates with the sound and so the wax now contains a recording of the sound in the groove. But early versions of the wax were fragile and not permanent, only strong enough for about 20 replays, not unlike the brevity of Lionel and David’s relationship.
A few years pass, Lionel writes to David, but he stops responding and by 1923 Lionel finds himself in Europe, teaching a boys’ choir in Rome where he’s developed a fling with a young male student (played with demon twink energy by Alessandro Bedetti), seemingly grasping for something or someone he’s not sure he’ll ever have again. Cinematographer Alexander Dynan (First Reformed, Hermanus’ Mary & George) gorgeously shoots Italy in a slightly dreamy, washed-out haze, not unlike Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s lensing of Call Me By Your Name. Unfulfilled, he finds his way to Oxford, where he meets Clarissa (Emma Canning), with whom he embarks on another relationship. She’s rich, and eager, but Lionel is still searching and seeking and what was going to be an engagement, she even brings him to meet her parents, becomes another remnant for him.
Restraint might feel like a dirty word when talking about gay romances in film. There really aren’t any limits in terms of what can be depicted on screen in terms of nudity and sexuality and indeed, both Mescal and O’Connor have already committed a rich tapestry of gay sex to film. That isn’t to say there isn’t sex in The History of Sound, there is. It’s fast but it’s intimate and beautiful, somewhere between A Room with a View and Maurice. But what’s wonderfully progressive about this story is that it’s not about repression or oppression. Lionel and David don’t quantify their relationship, just that it exists, and they express affection publicly in a careful but largely unchecked way. It’s a refreshing take on period gay films and Hermanus, who has run the gamut here from Moffie to Mary & George, finds a beautiful and melancholic middle here.
O’Connor is fantastic as David, confident and flirty, a bit of a rascal. Employing a similar accent to his work in Challengers proves to be a shrewd move as David’s Northeastern lilt is one of a bit of refinement from his time in London, similar to how Patrick Zweig’s highborn upbringing holds an articulate tone. Mescal fascinates as Lionel, hitting his American accent harder but not as an actor flaw but as someone who seems careful to eschew a good deal of his Kentucky drawl to fit in more with the conservatory crowd. He strikes just the right note here. The pair are a deeply charismatic duo who care for each other. David picking up feathers that keep falling out of Lionel’s pillow on one of their treks may be one of the more romantic gestures of anything I’ve seen this year.
Our story is told in retrospect, of sorts. The voice of Academy Award winner Chris Cooper (Adaptation.) narrates as the older David and he appears in the flesh in ‘present’ day 1980 in an absolutely heartbreaking and beautiful sequence in his home after partaking in an interview of his career and life where he remembers Lionel and the impact of their relationship on his future.
Over the last two centuries, variations on “Silver Dagger” have been performed by the likes of Joan Baez, Dolly Parton and Fleet Foxes; indeed a brief duet between Mescal and O’Connor in the film reveals the truly foundational elements this era of folk had on bands like Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear and more. It’s been a lasting and indelible impression. Like echoes through time, like the relationship between David and Lionel itself; fleeting, a distant memory, but permanently imprinted on the record of the soul.
Grade: A-
This review is from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival where The History of Sound premiered In Competition. MUBI will release the film theatrically in the U.S.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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