Ebony (Hattie Hook) wakes up alone on the beach after an all-night bender and comes to the frantic realization that she is late for a dance competition.  She calls her dance partner, Kol (Elias Anton), and they devise a plan to have her older brother, Adam (Thom Green), pick them both up to go to the competition.  During their ride to pick up Ebony, the two boys get to talking about music, literature, and life, slowly forging an intense and passionate connection. 

Goran Stolevski’s second feature film, Of an Age, premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival where it was picked up by Focus Features for distribution in the United States.  The 1999-set queer romance operates heavily in the realm of emotion, capturing the universal electricity of attraction while also portraying the unique hesitancy of the realization that one may not be strictly heterosexual.  Cinematographer Matthew Chuang, who also shot Stolevski’s lyrical debut You Won’t Be Alone (2022), is much more investigative with his camera this time as it passes over the bodies of these two men as they wordlessly dare each other to be the one who makes the first move. 

The chemistry between Anton and Green is the beating heart of the film, but Of an Age is an ethereal experience more than a standard romance film.  Incorporating the soundtrack of Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), Stolevski’s film joins the ranks of fleeting queer love stories that operate in the swelling emotion, albeit he gives his actors much more dialogue to work with than, say, Tsai Ming-liang‘s Days (2021). Despite the dancing, His latest is closer in regards to Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011) than Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced (2019) as one may initially imagine, instead opting for some of the frenetic energy found in Olivier Ducastel’s and Jacques Martineau’s Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016).  What is most impressive about the way the two boys talk is that they are both subtle in trying to impress each other but it never comes across as bragging.  It is helped by Stolevski’s clear affection for the references to music, cinema, and literature, furthered that he never talks about these influences in such an esoteric way that turns audiences off from them.  

Kol is our entry into the film, opening with him practicing his dance routine in the garage before Ebony’s SOS call. It becomes a frantic screaming match between the two friends; a little heavy-handed at times, but the acting will level out into something much more quiet, focused, and nuanced soon enough. Dressed in his bedazzled, low-cut suit, he storms through Tari’s (Kasuni Imbulana) house to pick up Ebony’s outfit while also having to defend his heterosexuality to her. Her casual accusation stings Kol and it is one of the first moments where Chuang’s camera slows, guaranteeing audiences are alerted to the exchange. For us, it sets us on the journey of self-discovery for Kol, something the young man will later admit to Adam, through no uncertain words and actions, that he is not quite ready to take the next steps on himself. Adam then tries to coax Kol along, gently at first – suggestions of Happy Together, and how he ended up with his ex’s mix tape of Barbra Streisand – then a little more overtly as he removes his shirt to beat the Melbourne summer heat. It is here when Chuang’s camera becomes its most inquisitive as it captures Kol’s glances over to Adam with extreme closeups of his neck, his arms, his back. He highlights the sweat off Adam’s muscles giving him a rugged and traditionally masculine look that is counterintuitive to the more flamboyant preconceptions about queer men at the time. It is a sequence that perfectly captures the war raging on in Kol’s mind – and the excited panic expertly portrayed by Anton – between embracing one’s identity and attractions while breaking down the systemic homophobic default of the society and time period. 

Of an Age is careful and quiet almost to a fault. It is a very specifically timed coming of age drama that is not overly interested in sex appeal, though it leans heavily on some evocative framing, nor is it totally interested in the idea of romance. Rather, Stolevski revisits the themes of acceptance and loneliness – both driving themes in You Won’t be Alone – but instead through a much more grounded and overtly queer lens. Set in a time not just before Grindr, but before smartphones in general, a time where the Nokia handset still reigned supreme, Stolevski is able to highlight the feelings of alienation that come with being somehow different, and the burden that can have on one’s life. By contrast, with the potential for hookups readily available at your fingertips as it is today, he posits that the human condition is one that asks us to find connection with others, and in a world so geared toward the heterosexual pairing as the start of the nuclear family, anyone that falls outside that immediate purview is, in a way, doomed.  

He examines this idea through a time jump late in the film; ten years after the missed dance competition, the two men return to Melbourne for Ebony’s wedding. What is important to note about how Stolevski concludes his thesis is that the simple, ceremonial act of a fairytale wedding is not enough, the soul craves a true connection more than it does a ring on the finger. It is not explicitly said – nothing in the film really is – but Ebony’s wedding has the pretense of being for show; the ever so slight gaudiness of it, her husband donning the same middle-school awkwardness of any clumsy teenaged boy during the couple’s first dance. To be fair, Ebony embraces her ballroom dancer roots, asking a lot of her new beau, but the whole affair seems to substitute showiness for actual affection. If it is not big enough, how will people ever believe we are in love?  

Adam has also married in his and Kol’s time apart, though he suppresses that fact about himself. Kol, however, is still alone, in so far as husbands are concerned, and while there is a tinge of sadness around that revelation, there is also a newfound confidence that was not present in the Kol of 1999. He has embraced aspects of queer culture in how he outwardly presents himself, though it appears to be an imitation in a way of how Adam presented himself a decade prior. Possibly, Kol has shaped himself into his memory of Adam to recreate that spark every time he sees his own reflection in the mirror. There is still a confidence about him, though, and it is not treated as Kol concealing himself, but rather, it serves as a reminder to himself to find a connection that goes deeper than just the physical. Having accepted himself, he will not settle for anything less than what he felt with Adam all those years ago. 

Stolevski continues his examination of the queer psyche with Of an Age, and he is already well at work on his third feature which will delve further into the topics of acceptance and of found family. While his work is inherently queer, it still deals with universal themes within which all audiences can find commonality. He uses the magic of cinema to carefully curate feelings within his audience, opting to edit this feature himself, but the worlds he creates do not feel like fairytale worlds where everyone pure of heart has a happy ending and the vile are punished. Life can be difficult. People can be cruel. But life can also be beautiful, and people can still be full of love. We are capable of feeling a whole spectrum of emotion, and Stolevski is resolved to capture every intimate feeling – the good and the bad – and examine it with a lyrical and artistic approach that can turn even the most crippling of losses into something wonderous to behold.