In the 1910s, two students of musicology, portrayed by Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, enter into a clandestine love affair that unfolds during a shared ethnographic journey across the remote regions of America, where they set out to collect folk songs. Deeply melancholic by nature, the lovers are less destined to fully inhabit their love than to endure its absence; it is in separation that the true intensity of their bond reveals itself.
The film carries the distant echoes of James Ivory’s Maurice and Brokeback Mountain, in its portrayal of a homosexual romance treated with quiet naturalness and self-evident grace, while contemplating the fleeting nature of beauty and of feeling itself.
Two radiant actors in a film that is both ardent and quietly enthralling.
