Of An Age (2023)

I love when I can find a film to champion. Writer/director Goran Stolevski's second feature is tailor made for my sensibilities. From his intimate, almost claustrophobic, camera work, to the gorgeous selective colour palette in his cinematography, to the melancholy romance of the central plot, to the ambiguity in its emotional centre, Of An Age is exactly the kind of film that plays to what I love about cinema. Yet it is also the sort of beautiful and tender film that almost anyone can fall for and enjoy. 

The film starts out with some panic, moments whose intensity is not quite explained but are clearly felt, sweeping us up into the urgency our central character (Anton) is experiencing in his 18 year old hyper-emotional state. Like him we can't even focus on Green's character for the first few moments, the camera only giving us brief glimpses of him for his first appearance, and it isn't until Anton and the audience have calmed down and we breathe, that Green, in all his cool young beauty, comes into focus. 

The conversation that follows is cat nip for me as they discuss cinema and literature (clever and suggestive references to Wong Kar Wai and Jorge Louis Borges) and I am 19 again and head over heals in love. Green is exactly the sort of fresh yet weary, academic yet lived, older boy I fancied when I was just like Anton, the awkward and pimply teen yearning to learn so much beyond what my experience was (only I wasn't in denial). These moments shook me for their familiarity as well as for Goran's sure narrative hand and incredible visual style that grounded Of An Age's romantic fantasy in real lived in experience. 

As the first act progresses and the two young men fumble towards the kind of one night that lives forever in your memory, in that sort of perfect way that impacts all other relationships you have going forward, the film just reached a place in my heart that brought up visceral memories and emotions. I was a bit weary of where the second act would go. Would it attempt to flesh out the reunification fantasy that these sorts of encounters engender and perhaps warm our hearts but feel dishonest? Stolevski doesn't go there and instead leans into a very genuine and complicated reunion that is heartbreakingly beautiful. As the story reached its rather abrupt yet *chef's kiss* conclusion, spurring in me a plethora of conflicting emotions, it suddenly rips from us the sort of cathartic resolution we are trained to expect in romantic films, I was left with the mess of emotions that only films of incredible power like The Before Trilogy or Moonlight (films that inspired this work) can create for us. 

Of An Age reached a place of connection and honesty for me that I rarely experience in films. Queer cinema is so often focused on either tragedy or affirming romance, but it is these beautiful little complicated stories which most successfully reach into my queer little heart and pull out all of the messy bits of human emotion that is so often denied sunlight. Stolevski has crafted a film that for me personally will be the sort of movie I can reflect on and enjoy over and over and that speaks to my real experiences in ways that few films do.  

Of An Age

Starring: Thom Green, Elias Anton, Hattie Hook

Writer/Director: Goran Stolevski