Peneflix MOVIE REVIEWS BY PENEFLIX
We are birthed with a cry and die with a sigh, or rattle. Director Oliver Hermamus gifts viewers a particularly poignant portrait of two young men instantaneously connected by their love and understanding of timeless folk tunes. Meeting at the Boston Conservatory in 1917 “Lionel” (Paul Mescal) and “David” (Josh O’ Connor) gracefully, plaintively, tenderly fall in love as Lionel sings a song, they alone are aware of. Josh O’Connor with nonpareil, palpable skill, enigmatically lurs Lionel into his lyrical lair, lasting a lifetime. David from inception is complete, firm, solid in his unwavering homosexuality; O’Connor’s face of a thousand eccentricities, glimpses, hints of passion or woe, yet to be requited. Profundity resides in his depiction of a lost but pragmatic soul. Whereas Lionel is still evolving, open to a heterosexual world, with him, despite his proclivities, reveling in it.
After the war and dented circumstances David and Lionel reconnect with a song collecting excursion through the backwaters of Maine; tracing indigenous peoples whose lives, tormented and joyous, are told through song; exquisitely depicting the powerful potency of memories through lyricism; slowly paced, meditatively cinematic, wrenchingly romantic, “The History of Sound” testifies to the invisibility, but primarily the daunting, haunting, redolent physicality of “Sound”.
THREE & ½ STARS!!!
Peneflix
