For most of us today, folk music is just another genre. You may have the general knowledge that it has origins as the naive traditional songs have been handed down for generations, but few people think much beyond that about it.
If so, you may recognize with all your joys and sorrows how much human experiences are enveloped in those traditional tunes, and how much private emotions refract to them through each link in the human chain that passes them on. Certainly that’s an esoteric idea, but the South African director (who won the film “Beauty” in Cannes in 2011) has a sophisticated cinematic vocabulary that can convey it.
Set in the year of World War I, the story of Lionel (Mezcal) and David (O’Connor), two music students they meet at university in 1917. Lionel comes from the humble origins of Maine’s farmland, but David is a young man of status and means, but it’s as close to love at first sight as you can get. They only grow brighter as their passion for music is deeper and deeper, they hit a spark together. Of course, it was 1917 and history is in the way. The war is declared, the university is closed, David is called to active service in Europe, and Lionel returns to a farm that is declining with the already slight fate of his family.
After the war, David is globally tired from his days at Trench, but wants to return to his music studies. Their journey is idyllic. They are deeply connected with music and people, and they meet along the way, record and accept their love for each other without reservation. But once that’s over, they go another path.
From there, the story takes his educational background to Europe, and into a life he has never dreamed of. Ultimately, fate provides a thread that may link them together once more. He casts a whole new light on his love for each other, leading him to hidden secrets that add yet another layer of personal meaning to the folk songs who once united them.
It’s easy to play the sexual attractions of lead couple Hermanus. He scored to enact an eternal thread of his sincere love, music, and shared human experiences. It has been firmly established to focus on authentic portrayals of queer experiences.
Naturally, its chemistry is spectacular. Mezcal wins our respect with his almost sacred performance with his stubborn refusal to melt our hearts and abandon queer hope, as he deepens his charm and masculine charm both here and in previous films (such as “Our Stranger”) by the vulnerable sensitivity he brings to his character. O’Connor eagerly welded us to the homophobic self-loathing in “The Kingdom of God” long before his stint as Prince Charles in his bisexual teen turn in “The Crown” or “Challenger.” The tragic atmosphere of his breached resignation. But this combination somehow evokes deep fantasies of our own. Our fantasies of true romance are to find the strange “hurricane eyes” that can live our truth protected from the strictness imposed by a larger society.
Inevitably there is a comparison that takes place with Brokeback Mountain, a typical tragic gay love story that shares the contrast between idyllic bliss and social obligations and reflects the trans-starry romance that drives it. And while we are the first to say we want to see the strange love on-screen now hindered by tragedy, timing and social practice, we cannot deny that it is important to remind us of the reality that has made that trope so eternally related, especially in a time when we are likely to be at political risk.
Either way, it’s hardly important. “The History of Sound” can move a little too slowly for some tastes, or enjoy a bit more depth of the appeal to music to suit the people just there for the love story, but in the end they manage to make their lovers fully embrace their audacity and life, and they need to maintain camouflage with each other. It is the tightrope of living in a homophobic society, and is vividly rendered with Hermanus’s laidback, deeply caring, and totally heart-pounding stories. From two of his own short stories, he adapted to Ben Shattuck’s screen and contemplated it as the final credit roll.
What elevates it beyond the bittersweet examination of strange love is the deep sense of the embrace of music as a continuous record of human existence in all its devastating cultural inconveniences. The “history of sound” is also a history of difficulties and sorrow, hope, dreams and inspiration, and by calling its continuous thread of experience, it connects it to the long, absorbed reality of strange love that has always existed outside the margin, reminding us that we have always been part of the ongoing story written today.
In all of that candid melancholy, it reminds us that despite our small mind dissent and whims of social acceptance, we are part of the whole and always part of the whole.
And if you need more encouragement to see it, that spitting scene is also pretty hot.
Source: Washington Blade: LGBTQ News, Politics, LGBTQ Rights, Gay News – www.washingtonblade.com
