Film review O'Connor and Mescal in tin-eared romance

The History of Sound Cannes film festival ★★★★☆

- Peter Bradshaw

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 that 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 both Beauty and Living, but this is a film that is almost petrified by its upscale 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 meet at Boston music conservatory just before the US entry into the first world war. Later, in the summer of 1920, they 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. And when fate parts them in the years after, their love story becomes something more poignant.

The first man is farm worker Lionel from Kentucky, played by Paul Mescal. A sonorous, stately voiceover at the beginning reveals him to have perfect pitch and synaesthesia - the ability to comprehend music in taste and colour as well as sound - but these abilities are not actually revealed in the film.