Worth: $15.50
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Cast:
Elias Anton, Thom Green, Hattie Hook
Intro:
It’s not a daringly new take on gay romance, but because it’s executed so well and resonates as something genuine and lived-in, it doesn’t need to be.
After making the ambitious and fitfully problematic folk-horror flip You Won’t Be Alone, writer/director/editor Goran Stolevski, follows-up by stripping everything back for a simpler tale of summertime gay romance.
Right from its introduction, going from Kol (Elias Anton) making a tear-stained phone call home in 2010, to a Strictly Ballroom-tier dance routine, to a far more histrionic conversation between Kol and friend Ebony (Hattie Hook) back in 1999, this is an English-language film, which could be excused for having subtitles, even within its own cultural demographic.
This ocker beginning passes the vital first test for a coming-of-age story in its recognisability, with the added spice of Hook’s terminally and delightfully shrill delivery during that phone call, setting the tone nice and early.
The narrative focus for the first two-thirds of the film is on a road trip taken by Kol and Ebony’s brother Adam (Thom Green), as they try and find where the bloody hell Ebony has gotten to, after a particularly hard night out. The resulting conversations between the closeted and on-the-cusp-of-graduating-high-school Kol and the more worldly Adam, do a terrific job of articulating that odd form of pretence, that comes with going from being at the top of the food chain at the end of high school, and then dropping back to the bottom again once you’re out in the big wide working world. Like with the setting, there’s a lot to relate to here.
Same with the film’s approach to Kol’s gradual coming-out and his crash-course relationship with Adam which, with all of Adam’s talk of linguistics and listening to foreign film scores, echoes Call Me by Your Name in its multicultural influences (ditto for Kol’s Serbian-Australian heritage). And like with CMBYN, its main dramatic function is to preserve a specific moment in a character’s larger romantic history. That experience of first love, colliding into it without really considering the idea that it could happen in the first place because… well, you may have left school, but there’s still so much to learn. The smooth and natural progression of events, not to mention Kol’s climactic moment of growth (probably a less dirty way to word that, but that’s what we’re going with), adds to the prevailing warmth within the story that Stolevski has put together here.
Of An Age will likely win bonus points with an Australian audience, but the deeper understanding that it shows of love and learning from all manner of experiences, is what really makes it stand out. It’s not a daringly new take on gay romance, but because it’s executed so well and resonates as something genuine and lived-in, it doesn’t need to be.
