‘A History of Sound’ Puts Itself on Mute

At Cannes, where The History of Sound had its premiere, star Paul Mescal described the comparisons being made between his period romance and Brokeback Mountain “lazy and frustrating.” To have your film automatically placed up against the landmark gay love story of the millennia has to be aggravating, but with all due respect to the actor: Come the fuck on. The History of Sound , which was directed by Oliver Hermanus and based on a pair of short stories by Ben Shattuck (who also wrote the script), is, like Brokeback , a queer romance starring two of our hottest rising stars. Like Brokeback , it’s a film about characters who are forever marked by an Edenic stretch of time together in nature, and whose later experiments with more societally approved paths can’t compare to what the