Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor, in love

In a moment of weakness, one might be tempted to agree with viewers who believe that The history of sound is fussy, tedious, 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 muted way, and that the overall production of the film, at times, seems to be designed to be accompanied by the hashtag #OnePerfectShot. But if we think about it twice, in the end, we don't have to agree with them. Because if the sixth film by South African director Oliver Hermanus is like this, 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, an adagio tempo, and winter colorimetry. If Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor, two fashionable actors, remain silent and hide their sexual-affective bond, it makes sense for the film to have a silent spirit. And what cannot be said in words is communicated through songs.

The anthropological journey that 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 first Terence Davies, popular and traditional music is a structuring axis of a film that, in the end, speaks of belonging. Even if the place you feel you belong to rejects you.