I watched The History of Sound (Oliver Hermanus, 2025) on the first day of Pride month, and after letting my thoughts marinate a couple of days I really enjoyed it, but I think it would have meant even more to me a few years ago when I was obsessed with Thomas Barrow's storyline in Downton Abbey. This film is set in the exact same historical timeframe, largely 1917 to 1927, but it is a story about men loving men, not straight people reacting to men loving men.
Unfortunately, DA creator Julian Fellowes is in the majority for post Hays Code queer representation. There are so many media pieces that reduce all queer stories to secrets being revealed that I've seen narratives described as "coming out" stories in which no coming out takes place, most recently Barry Jenkins' Moonlight (2016). While coming out and/or being outed are common experiences for queer people even today, the near exclusive focus on these at the expense of all other queer experience privileges the perspectives of those who must be come out to. In The History of Sound, Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O'Connor) never tell anyone they are lovers, and no one ever finds them out. Their secret remains a secret, and yet they still suffer sufficiently for David to kill himself soon after returning to his wife and baby (whom he also keeps secret! This man was truly living a double life).
In a superficial sense, this film has a lot in common with Brokeback Mountain from 21 years before. Both are stories about queer men who are the loves of each other's lives but choose to pursue socially acceptable relationships instead of each other. While he does not go through with it, Lionel comes close to marrying a woman before attempting to track down David in Maine. Both Ennis and Jack marry and father children with women. But as groundbreaking as Brokeback Mountain was for its time, it still centers Ennis's fear of being found out triggered by his witnessing the aftermath of an anti-gay hate crime as a child. The threat of violence is much more subtle in The History of Sound. Lionel and David are not living in constant dread of being assaulted or pilloried, but these are possibilities the audience is meant to be aware of without the film constantly reminding us.
Unlike Downton Abbey, and to a lesser extent Brokeback Mountain, The History of Sound is not a film about how hard it was for men to love each other back in the day. It is about how music can transcend circumstances and connect people across time and even beyond death. Those two people just happen to be two men who are in love. So, my biggest criticism of it is, where the hell were you in 2014? But as Chris Cooper's Lionel learns in the final scenes, the thing is to appreciate what you have when you get it, not live in regret for all the years you spent without it.
