Why are these jerks in everything at the moment?
dir: Oliver Hermanus
2025
The film’s first 10 minutes are absolutely perfect. Few films can sustain such perfection for even that long, but almost none can maintain it for an entire running time.
I mean, it’s not the first 10 minutes of Pixar’s Up, but almost nothing on this planet in this reality have ever been able to compete with that.
I should qualify further, in that, obviously, it’s only perfect as far as I’m concerned: others could watch the same ten minutes and wonder what the fuck I was either on or on about.
The intro brings us into a world as experienced by one man early in the 20th century. As a boy, he experiences the world not only through the wonderment of sound, but through the synaesthesia that he is host to. He has perfect pitch, but also experiences every sound as musical, knowing what key his mother coughs in, or that dogs bark in.
All related to us by the sure, certain tones of Chris Cooper, as the old man looking back on the younger man, who was born in and grew up in a shack in Kentucky. They may have been dirt poor dirt farmers in the 1910s, but they still had music, at least. Young Lionel first feels the pull of unknown songs, a hunger for every folk song and story, at too young an age.
His gift sees him sent to a conservatory in Boston, just as the Americans are about to enter the Great War, and it’s there that he meets the love of his life, David (Josh O’Connor). They bond over a shared love of folk music, somehow knowing tunes in common despite having grown up on different sides of the pond. David’s parents died when he was young, and so he travelled through the Lakes District in England with his uncle, collecting such songs.
Much later in the film we hear the elder Lionel reading the introduction to a book of his, explaining why folk music is the most “warm blooded” form of music, across the world, across nationalities. It’s important to grasp that these folk songs, the existence of these songs, is pretty important to the film. It is not a musical by any stretch but there is a lot of singing, a lot of playing.
There is a familiarity and a darkness in these songs. I will not pretend to be an expert on anything, least of all music, but even I can see where the film is going with many of these songs. On the surface, they’re about love, but quite often they’re about loss, and even darker themes.
Lionel’s first songs were at the feet of his father (remember, the idea of recorded music doesn’t exist yet), and so when first meeting David he is taunted into singing a song that matters to him, being Silver Dagger.
David calls all others in the pub to be silent, to best hear what Lionel sings. And what a song it is.
Would it work if Lionel didn’t have a solid, entrancing voice (Paul Mescal’s voice is maybe reminiscent of a much younger Bill Callahan?). Probably not. He sings, adopting the character of a fair maiden, admonishing someone not to sing love songs, lest they wake her mother, who clutches a silver dagger in her sleep. The mother has instilled in the daughter not a fear of men, but a wariness of their inconstancy, of their propensity for loving and leaving a woman, like the mother was seduced and abandoned by whoever the daughter’s father was. Is the silver dagger to defend her daughter from seduction, or to threaten the daughter not to seek love or desire? The daughter seems resigned to the fact that her mother will never consent to allowing her daughter to be a bride.
And this is a folk song? A popular ditty song by kids and old people alike?
While Lionel’s singing, all hold their breath, but when he’s done, everyone else goes on with their lives, except David is enraptured, and they sing songs together all night.
That they end up in bed together seems perfectly natural and believable, two young men in love with music and their own youth, more than anything, even if this is 1917, and they might have been, I dunno, burned at the stake or something in that era.
Like I said right at the start, this was pretty much the first ten minutes of the film.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, there’s another two hours to go. We already have the many seeds planted of where this story will go: they might have love, but they won’t be able to be together long term. David sings a different song at some stage, of a maid who has died, whose beloved can’t let her go, and disturbs her eternal rest with his woe and his warblings. Go, she urges him, live a life without me, I’ll be fine, don’t pine because it won’t do either of us any good, and stop dropping tears on my tombstone; it’s embarrassing, dude.
And yet, with all the warnings in place, warnings that all the folk songs seem to be giving both of them, the heart wants what the heart wants, doesn’t it?
David is drafted and sent off to the trenches, Lionel’s eyesight isn’t great, and he is spared the battlefield, but the conservatory is closed due to a slight case of war. How handsome does David look in his uniform! I do so hope that he makes it back in one piece.
How do you keep them on the Kentucky farm once they’ve tasted life in the big city? Lionel is no more suited to the field and the plough than he is to the battlefield, and yet poverty, something that clings to him like a curse, cannot be avoided. He is only briefly reunited with his mother and father, I say briefly, because despite one coughing all the time and the other seeming fine, none of the people in Lionel’s life seem to be long for this world, as the phrase goes.
His months on the farm leave him primed for change, for something, anything when David, returned from the battlefield alive but not in one piece, suggests they tour the sites in rural New England (Maine, mostly), in their pursuit of folk songs from everyone they can steal them from. It’s almost like they’re some (white) vampires trying to steal culture from other, not so white folk.
David says this is a research trip funded by his college, and that’s why he has a newly invented device for Lionel to lug around: one of them there fancy doohickeys that someone working for Thomas Edison probably invented and Edison took credit for, which records songs on wax cylinders. To be blunt, they spend their days walking, their afternoons and evenings recording people singing their songs, and then blissful nights together in their tent, under the stars, or around a campfire.
This is their idyll, these are their salad days; their time on Brokeback Mountain that no-one will be able to take away from them. Lionel knows, and we probably get the feeling, since it’s his story, that he’ll never be happier, however long he lives.
But we get the sense that David is struggling with something. When they visit an isolated interracial community made up of former slaves and white folks, on Malaga Island, in Phippsburg, Maine, the state government is about to come in and evict everyone and burn their houses to the ground, because… well because they can.
Lionel is prosaic about it while David rants about the injustice of it all. Mind you this is two gay men in 1919 arguing about what’s fair and right and what isn’t, yet Lionel, as a Southerner with a grandfather that fought on the Confederate side of the Civil War, says to David that he has to appreciate that things like this happen, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it, because the cops kill people with impunity.
Not like these days, huh?
It seems like, for the first time, other than a few salty comments here and there, that this is a falling out about class, as in, that Lionel is implying David’s wealthy upbringing, even as an orphan (with money) means he’s been sheltered and coddled all his life, not seeing the injustices that the rest of us shrug our shoulders over, because we’re too poor to have worthwhile or informed opinions, but David is incensed, because of something far more serious, yet Lionel doesn’t see it until it’s way too late.
David has never volunteered anything about his time in the trenches, beyond saying that his experience of the war has left him somewhat dulled, in that life and the world has lost some of its keenness, its brightness has dimmed, for him. He only hints at how damaged he is inside. And yet he resents Lionel for not being able to see it, the dark smoke inside him that infects everything.
By the time their journey has ended, it feels like Lionel hopes this is a temporary breach, but there is a note of finality on David’s part. He is perhaps ready to move on, and he hopes Lionel will move on also, what with questions about wives and children and such. When Lionel brings up the possibility of further song-finding treks, well, noises are made but it all sounds half-hearted.
Many years pass before Lionel gets the full story of David, and we in the audience (perhaps) endure years of Lionel living and working in Europe, in Britain, in the States, back to Britain, severing relationships and chasing something that proves elusive, regardless of how he succeeds professionally. Like another recent film with beautiful locations and oodles of voiceover narration regarding a man who loses much and can’t seem to go on living, being Train Dreams, at least Lionel gets to do what he loves, which is write books about music.
I mean, that’s something at least. The man got to hang out with Bob Dylan, I guess, so his life wasn’t a total waste(?)
Decades later, so many decades after Lionel could have and we hope must have reconciled himself to his lost love, to getting a final answer to the riddle (long after some other questions I won’t spoil have already been answered), something appears out of nowhere. And we get to hear a song again, from the film’s first glorious ten minutes, and that is the scene that struck a nail through my heart, as the flick ends. It’s a beautiful ending. I’m tempted to be cynical, to claim it was contrived, unlikely, all that nonsense, but it’s an impulse I can fight, easily.
For most of the flick, I’ll be honest, it was a flick I was admiring more than feeling, because there’s a distance there, much of the time. The scenes between the two chaps are wonderful, are lovely, at some points. They have an easy chemistry together that’s enjoyable to watch. They’re both accomplished actors and they do well in their respective roles. The songs they capture, sing or are witness to are generally beautifully done. This flick never forgets its commitment to reminding us that the miracle of sound, its amazing qualities, are a wonder, and what we do with it, in song and with instruments, can often be almost divine.
But it’s also a love story, and for the vast majority of the film’s screen time, it’s a very one-sided affair, because there’s only one of them onscreen, who feels lost because of his loss, frustrating audiences with both his actions and his inactions. We’re kept at arm’s length much of the time, much the same as Lionel ultimately keeps everyone not called David at arm’s length.
It’s a beautiful film, sad yet admirable. I don’t know what more I wanted, but maybe that says more about me than the film.
8 times most flicks would kill to have 10 perfect minutes out of 10
--
“Write. Send chocolate. Don’t die.” – wise words to say to anyone, really - The History of Sound
- 177 reads