Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor, in love

At a moment of weakness, one might be tempted to agree with viewers who believe that The history of sound is fussy, soporific, and cutesy. It would be to deny the evidence that the film has a languid narrative, that the love story it tells is presented in a dull manner, and that the overall production of the film sometimes seems as if it were designed to be accompanied by the hashtag #OnePerfectShot. But if we think twice, in the end, there's no need to agree with them. Because if the sixth film by South African director Oliver Hermanus is this way, it's because, clearly, it wants to be. It's a stylistic choice, a fully conscious vote for creative rigor.

The charm of The history of sound lies in its stylized restraint. This romantic affair between two music students in the early 1920s, when same-sex relationships were not exactly well-regarded, calls for discretion, a tempo of adagio, and. If Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor, two fashionable actors, remain silent and hide their sexual-emotional bond, it makes sense that the film has a silent spirit. And what cannot be said with words is communicated with songs.

The anthropological journey the protagonists undertake to compile folk songs, as the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax did, turns The history of sound into a very sung film. As in the cinema of the early Terence Davies, popular and traditional music is a backbone of a film that, in the end, speaks of the sense of belonging. Even if the place you feel you belong to rejects you.