The History of Sound review: Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor's gay romance is 'too polite'

In this period drama, premiering at Cannes, two of Hollywood's buzziest male actors play lovers making music together – but the film could do with far more passion and urgency.

Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain was released 20 years ago, but there haven't been many period dramas about same-sex romances since. In a way, then, The History of Sound must count as a daring project: an expensive Hollywood film in which two of cinema's buzziest male actors are cast as gay lovers. Subject matter aside, though, it's an oddly old-fashioned and conventional work. If you'd never heard of its stars, Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor, you could easily mistake it for a long-lost film made by some Merchant Ivory impersonators in the 1980s or 90s.

Mescal plays Lionel, a Kentucky farm boy who is raised in a shack in the early years of the 20th Century. As well as having perfect pitch, Lionel supposedly has a remarkable singing voice – and although Mescal's singing never sounds any better than anyone else's in the film, the character's talents are enough to earn him a place in a Boston conservatory. This is just one of the many advancements that come implausibly easily to him.

Just as easily, the shy Lionel falls into a relationship with the arch and confident David (O'Connor), a composition student with a taste for folk music. Their problem-free romance continues until David is drafted to fight in World War One and Lionel has to return to his family farm. But in 1919 (every date is there on the screen, so we don't get lost), David invites Lionel to go on a song-collecting field trip with him. The pair will roam around the scenic countryside for weeks, recording folk ballads on wax cylinders, and sleeping under canvas, where they can have tasteful, un-explicit sex, with no apparent worries about prejudice or danger.

Still, this blissful camping holiday can't last forever, so Lionel will have to decide what to do in the years ahead. Settle down with David in a minor college? Move to Europe where he is sure to be lauded as a great chorister? Or take over the farm from his aged parents.

To be honest, all three options look pretty enviable. Directed by Oliver Hermanus, the maker of Moffie and Living, The History of Sound is one of those too-beautiful period dramas in which every house is spotlessly clean, even in the backwoods, and every costume is immaculately tailored and richly coloured. Never mind his singing, Lionel's most impressive gift seems to be his ability to find the ideal suit-and-tie combination for every occasion.

Aesthetics aside, life goes too smoothly for him for the film to pluck the heartstrings with any force. Lionel may have some doubts about his feelings for David, but he never seems ruffled. Mescal and O'Connor are nuanced and charismatic, and it's amazing that an Irish actor and English actor should play these most American of roles so flawlessly, but The History of Sound doesn't probe beneath the attractive surface of its star-crossed lovers.

It chronicles their lives slowly and steadily through the 1920s, but it doesn't find any urgency until what seems to be the final scene – but then it turns out that there are several more scenes afterwards, and they all seem to be the final scene, too. The screenplay by Ben Shattuck is adapted from his own short story, and yet, with its leisurely pace and multiple endings, the film feels longer than its two-hour running time.

It's left to the melancholy ballads of heartbreak and grief to provide the piercing emotion that is lacking elsewhere. The most romantic sequence has Lionel and David walking through the woods, harmonising exquisitely without any preparation, so it's a shame that such songs are missing for so much of this polite and polished film. The irony is that Lionel makes a speech about why he likes folk music: it's because it's impassioned, raw and messy. The History of Sound is none of those things.

★★☆☆☆

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