Writers: Ben Shattuck
Director: Oliver Hermanus
Paul Mescale and Josh O’Connor are rather ubiquitous at this year’s BFI London Film Festival 2025, as young actors building a career tend to be, and it was only a matter of time before they appeared in a film together, Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound directed by Oliver Hermanus, a story striving for epic love across a lifetime but not quite finding the resonance it aspires to. Ostensibly about the capturing of folk songs Shattuck and Hermanus’ film eschews what could have been a more interesting discussion of ethics and purpose in the collection and publication of music that should belong to everyone and instead focuses on a wanderer who missed his main chance for love.
Farmer Lionel loves to sing and in 1917 attends the Boston Conservatory where he meets musician and researcher David where a romantic relationship forms. Taking a trip together to collect folk songs once David returns from his war service, the experience haunts Lionel for a lifetime, and long after they part, Lionel is shaped by their time together.
Shattuck and Hermanus’ film aims for the grand, lifechanging emotion but never quite reaches its destination. There is some chemistry between Mescale’s Lionel and O’Connor’s David but the latter is too thinly drawn to really inspire the connection that A History of Sound wants to imply. The audience see them together but David shares very little – one reason for that emerges later – but beyond the music, there is little of substance that no matter how many longing looks or Brokeback Mountain style nights in the open air they share, the relationship never feels really tangible or grounded in any sense of their lives or sexuality in an era that prevented men from being together. What do they see in each other?
But as Lional seems doomed to restlessly walk the earth, moving through European cities and drawn back home, Shattuck and Hermanus don’t investigate the music itself or the appropriateness of its capture. Nell Leyshon’s play Folk at the Hampstead Theatre also examined the work of an English collector in the same early twentieth-century period but the play asked why it was appropriate to pin down an evolving oral tradition. There is some reference to recording the singer’s name and the title but nothing further on the attempt to trap an intangible thing and why these young men should profit from it – certainly from book sales, television appearances and a career for Lional in a sentimental addendum to the main action.
Mescal holds the film, telling the story from Lionel’s point of view and reinforcing his leading man potential, although the strength of his feeling and nomadic existence are less well explained. O’Connor only appears in a small portion of the film and its hard to grasp why his character is so inspired by Lionel. There was a better, more substantial film in here but as a showcase for its actors it’s a little dreary but fine.
The History of Sound is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
