Review: OF AN AGE

Kol is practicing for the high school final dance competition when his dance partner Ebony who has woken on the beach after a wild night calls him to come and get her. He finally sources a lift from her brother Adam who breaks it to Kol that they will not make it in time for the competition. But journeys are about getting there not arriving. Adam, whose young adult beauty is finished with an effortless charm, lightly teases Kol out of his anxiety and the conversation takes an easier turn that gives a glossy coat to some exploration happening at the same time. When Kol discovers that Adam is gay, he retreats into a broey aloofness while dealing with his panic. They retrieve Ebony from her chaos point and the three have an interesting ride home. Finally back home, Kol dives into his privacy and deals with big things. It's not just the first time in his life that he has knowingly been desired and how electric it is but it is nowhere near what he thought it would be. He's only just eighteen with fresh memories of high school and the hetero normative machismo at the command post of the culture. He's clearly thought about where he stood in relation to that but he has also failed to find answers. Now that they're banging down the door he's torn.

This love story is delivered in two parts, the adrenal sprint from childhood and adolescence to a leap of personal freedom, and a second look a decade on when both more mature men have gone their ways and find each other again. While the dialogue and demonstrated circumstances relay a lot of story around these characters the film concentrates on Kol and Adam's love and how it changed both of them and then what time and distance does to that. The performances of Thom Green and Elias Anton are so organic and nuanced you will not crave any plotty narrative, you'll be too busy watching and listening to them, following the changes like a time lapse film of a blooming rose. Props to make up and wardrobe for turning the eighteen year old handsome through his spots Kol into the chiselled and assured grown up he is a decade on. 

Goran Stolevski wowed festival audiences last year with his Balkan folk horror You Won't Be Alone because he insisted on removing all but the most egregious of tropes to strike a balance between the eerie and the earthy. It is pleasing to report that his humane eye is just as capacious in this more contemporary take on what love does to us (you could easily argue that that is the earlier film's theme, too). His craft with actors is happily augmented by a sharp ear for dialogue. When it is awkward (particularly from Kol's swallowed panic moments) it's meant to be. Adam's teasing of his sister's reading of Hamlet as a teen blazer school alpha chick is laugh out loud funny and the negotiation around realistic. As this is a film of understanding and between-line messages we also get to feel a lot with a little.

If you investigate any cinema made before widescreen ratios were normal (early 1950s and before) you will have noticed that this near square frame is apt for expressing heights but here it shows us intimacy. Whether that's the edgy unpredictability of the mood in a car, a sudden and liberating kiss, or the sloppy crowding of a party, the screen always feels full. Don't take this as an indication of the film working as well or better on a tv screen; go to the cinema for it, be in the car and ride with it.