Of An Age. MA15+, 100 minutes. 4 stars
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Sometimes in life a brief encounter with someone can be meaningful and memorable and have an impact in ways that far outlast its length, for good or ill. Goran (You Won't Be Alone) Stolevski's poignant new film is about one such experience.
The set-up is involved and a wee bit contrived, as are a few later moments in the film. It begins early one morning in one of the less posh Melbourne suburbs in 1999. Recent high school graduate Nikola - a Serbian Australian known as Kol (Elias Anton from Barracuda) - is practising for the dance final he has later in the day when receives a frantic early morning phone call from his dance partner Ebony (Hattie Hook from Savage River).
She's ringing from a public phone box - remember those? - and after a wild night of partying has woken up on a beach with only a vague idea of what happened. The competition is in a few hours, she's a long way from home, her bag and shoes are missing, and she needs to be found and brought back without her mother knowing.
Doing her bidding, Kol goes to recruit her older brother Adam (Thom Green from Dance Academy), who has a car, for the rescue mission. Ebony sees a street name and it's enough for the guys to work out where she is.
It soon becomes apparent that the dance final - which, no big spoiler, Ebony and Kol don't get to - is simply the device to bring together the two main characters. Adam and Kol are barely acquaintances but as they go on the long drive to pick up Ebony, they begin talking and get to know each other.
Scenes of two people talking in a car might sound static and dull but the actors, writer-director-editor Stolevski and cinematographer Matthew Chuang make them work very well, letting us learn about the characters as they learn about each other - and, perhaps, themselves. The dialogue occasionally sounds slightly mufffled
Whether they're talking about the cassettes - remember those? Ah, nostalgia - they're listening to, books by Kafka, Borges and Dickens, or simply their lives, they're engaging and likeable and it soon becomes clear they are forming a connection, despite their differences and the odd circumstances in which they've suddenly been thrown together. It's also clear that their time together will be brief, as Adam is going to Brazil the following day for postgraduate work and will be away for a long time. The internet is not yet omnipresent and it doesn't seem like they will be able to stay in touch (apparently the idea of writing letters doesn't occur to them).
The conversation and the rapport feel real and it's hard not to care about the characters and hope that somehow things will turn out well for them.
Adam offhandedly mentions his ex is a man, Kol is jarred. Adam seems to recognise something about Kol that the younger man couldn't or wouldn't acknowledge and accept about himself.
Some of what follows is predictable but then the film leaps forward in time and we find out what's happened to the characters years later.
While the coming-out/coming-of-age movie isn't new, the Macedonian-born Stolevski makes it fresh and appealing. This film isn't as sexually explicit as Lonesome, another Australian movie about young gay men, but it doesn't need to be: what's important is the emotional as well as physical bonding that takes place unexpectedly and the unhappy knowledge it's not going to last.
Many films are overlong but this is one where I could happily have spent more time with the characters.