Beautiful, touching, well acted, and extremely romantic. A sweet little homage to Andrew Haigh and Linklater Before Sunrise, Of an Age arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that understands exactly what it is excavating. It is a love story about time. About timing. About the kind of connection that detonates your sense of self and then echoes forward for years.
Set largely across a single day in the late nineties, the film follows Kol, a young Serbian immigrant and ballroom dancer in Australia, who spends twenty four unexpected hours with Adam, the older brother of his dance partner. What unfolds is less about plot and more about recognition. The feeling of being seen for the first time. The rush of being wanted. The terror that comes with both.
There is a revelation we experience as young queer people, a realization that life will go differently for us than almost everyone we have ever met. It is personal and profound and terrifying. It anchors us to that period of our lives and it echoes forward in time. The world contracts and expands and suddenly a decade later we are dancing at someone’s wedding from an old life and we come face to face with our younger selves, caught in that moment of revelation. My sincerest hope for you is that it is a moment of joy.
Stolevski understands this intimately. His camera cuts intrusively close. The faces of Elias Anton and Thom Green are centered and straining to escape. The ratio boxes them in, keeping us enclosed in their interiority and languishing in their burgeoning push and pull. There is a part of us still stuck there. In those moments of panic and fear, of a self belief that cuts deep, its scars of shame not fading away. The cinematography often feels like a home video memory that has been polished but not perfected. Slightly shaky. Slightly hazy. Utterly immediate.
The way they try to steal glances at each other in the first section versus how they look at each other as much as they can in the later section is breathtaking. Before they even meet, it feels as if Kol is already missing Adam. When they are apart, there is a visible absence, like a limb temporarily severed. I have seen people call this boring. I completely disagree. It is almost overwhelming how much happens in every pause, every inhale, every deflected joke. The dialogue is funny, literate, sometimes pretentious in that very specific young adult way where references to books and films become shields. But that is part of the texture. At that age, performance is survival.
The Happy Together allusions are overt, even name checked, yet they never feel hollow. Stolevski is not merely quoting Wong Kar Wai. He is channeling that same aching awareness of impermanence. Adam becomes both object of desire and future ghost. He is gentle, restrained, worldly. Kol is electric, open, on the brink of becoming. Their chemistry is undeniable. I blushed alongside them. I laughed at their flirting. I yearned as they did. It has been a long time since a love story made me feel like this.
There are the people who dismiss this as two young men sharing one experience and then carrying it too heavily into the future. I did not feel that distance. Some connections are like that. A single night can redraw the map of your life. There is no in between. You either forget the bathroom stall encounter by morning or you carry that sunrise for decades. Of an Age believes in the latter, and so do I.
It is appropriate that the distance of eleven years finds our characters in the waning days of their twenties. It is the age when for many of us our queer shame is shed. The parts and particulars about ourselves that we have hidden and repressed are pulled apart and torn asunder. That fight or flight feeling of self preservation replaced by a newly found abandon on a dance floor at a forgotten friend’s wedding. But it pangs and bangs to get out. To stifle our enduring prosperity and remind us we come from a broken world that nurtures our broken queer hearts.
The film is also about hometowns. About immigrant families. About friendships that feel infinite until they are not. It is about how someone can wound you in youth and later rewrite history to cast themselves as the hero. It is about the fleeting yet infinite nature of childhood bonds. And yes, it is about first love. The kind that burrows deep and never quite leaves.
The final stretch avoids easy melodrama. It sits in ambiguity. It allows glances and half spoken lines to carry the weight. There is no grand speech to clarify everything. Just bodies in proximity and the clock still ticking. I forgive Goran Stolevski for any past cinematic sins because Of an Age is the best film I have seen in a very long time. A ninety nine minute therapy session I did not know I needed.
There is a part of us still stuck there. Of an age we thought we had left behind. Watching this, I felt grateful for every version of myself that survived long enough to remember.
Comments