The History of Sound
Oliver Hermanus
2025, 127 mins.
…can’t be your bride
Some of the best movies ever made are not really what they portend to be. In this case, while sound leads much of the narrative, it’s really the chemistry between the tunes that goes beyond the Edison “records” (painstakingly captured on wax), that strikes a chord so much further than just the life and times of two “songcatchers”.
A Kentucky boy with a truly special voice (Paul Mescal easily moving from to joy to calamity in this wide-ranging role), meets up with chain smoker/composer/pianist David (this catalytic portrayal from “You’re my everything” to “too soon gone”, and “family heir”, is readily accomplished by Josh O’Connor). From their base at Boston’s venerable New England Conservatory, it seems as if their shared love of music (and soon bed), will blossom into a love/art story for the ages. But, alas, WW1 conscription sends David to the front lines and visually impaired Lionel back to his farm in Kentucky, where his parents are struggling to both live and make ends meet.
But before you can say, “All is lost”, (1920) the musical, amorous pair are reunited in Maine, only to begin their quest of walking high and low, dutifully recording folk songs of all stripes (especially the heart-wrenching ballads, see headline, above) as they go.
Curiously, importantly, much of the rest of the film is more focussed on personal leavings, than intimate togetherness. Now an accomplished artist (1923), Lionel summarily dumps an alluring young boyfriend in Rome before slipping over to England and nearly marrying an heiress whose riches would never remind him of what real work is. Driven back to Kentucky by his dying mother, the suddenly disengaged master of sound is a few measures too late but, more than ever, still desperately wanting to reconnect with his past paramour in New England despite so many long-ago letters that were never returned...
It then falls to the alluring Belle (Sophie Hearn), to fill in some of David’s devastating blanks and leave Lionel recalling an important lyric from previous song collections, Let her be dead (all of the flashbacks are seamlessly done).
Eventually, of course, the wax cylinders come full circle, but not before the audience realizes, once and for all, that Hermanus (along with writer Ben Shattuck) demonstrate succinctly that their production is more about the pauses, nay silences which take aural command, even after that last stanza has come to rest. JWR
Wrong Numbers
Duane Edwards
2025, 90 mins.
They deserve each other
Sometimes the premise works far better than the final script.
Here, writer Frederick Mensch captures our attention from the start. In an upscale restaurant, a beautiful, sexy young woman (Emily Hall) has been dumped by her blind date and left entirely alone. At an adjacent table a successful, middle-aged businessman (David Kelsey) has just bid adieu to his clients and, of course, picked up the check.
But suddenly, unknown to each other, the unlikely pair are verbally thrust together with an opening line, seemingly out of nowhere: “Oh, I hate blind dates” and the rest of film can be predicted from there.
Right on cue, this virtual two-hander dutifully moves the ever-more personal chat from the restaurant to the boudoir and then—months later—the coffee shop (will anyone notice the initial coincidence?) to the modest apartment with nary a single surprise en route. In Part I, the beguiling woman is all seductress before Part 2 (10 months later), it falls to the “I haven’t forgotten you for a single day” soon to be liberated (from marriage, of course) man to desperately try and have his way no matter what.
A couple of red herrings (“Have I got an investor for you”; there is a gun in the house) never strike narrative gold, leaving no one satisfied—especially most viewers.
The saving grace is Deven Delaney’s original music where a compelling drum kit underscores the action whenever a key plot point emerges.
Most viewers may well choose to hang up on these wrong numbers and avoid their obvious connections. JWR