Last October, Macedonian-Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski made a ferocious debut with You Won’t Be Alone, a stunningly original and just top-to-bottom brilliant folk horror that announced a truly thrilling new talent. Less than a year later, and he’s back for his more grounded sophomore feature; Of an Age, a whirlwind coming-of-age romance about a gay teenager in suburban Australia. It’s not as ambitious or impressive as its predecessor, but this is still clearly a film from a fascinating and confident new auteur, a romantic and urgent look at how a 24 hour encounter can shape an entire life.
Our lead here is the almost-18 Nikola, aka Kol (Elias Anton), a Yugoslav-born and Australian raised amateur ballroom dancer (a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Stolevski himself). It’s 1999, with the new millennium approaching, and Kol needs to get to the local civic centre for the finals of a dance competition. The problem is that his dance partner, the thoughtlessly bratty Ebony (Hattie Hook), got incredibly drunk last night and has woken up on a distant beach with only a payphone for communication, needing to be picked up. For this mission, Kol recruits Ebony’s older brother Adam (Thom Green), the only non-parent either one of them knows with a car, and so Kol and Adam cruise around the beaches looking for Ebony.
There’s an immediate frisson, both in terms of physical attraction – Adam is openly gay while Kol isn’t quite there yet – and an intellectual connection. Kol has worldly ambitions and Adam seems to be the first person he’s ever met that doesn’t seek to belittle them; in fact, Adam himself is about to head off to Argentina to make good use of a Spanish degree, this imminent departure adding to the urgency of the possible romance between the two.
Anton and Green are both great, each capturing the various degrees of nervousness and excitement of the encounter and playing off one another to affecting and funny results while Stolevski’s writing and direction makes obvious the strength and importance of their connection. When Kol is dealing with Ebony, everything’s fraught, ragged and loud conversations over the phone matched by a nauseatingly mobile camera, the world only slowing down to a bearably comfortable state once Kol gets into Adam’s car. Suddenly shots linger longer, while easygoing chats take in both literary discussions and gently flirty snipes.
If you’re expecting the same kind of genre-bending uniqueness that was everywhere in You Won’t Be Alone, you might be a little disappointed in Of an Age, which sticks relatively close to coming-of-age conventions even with the final third being dedicated to a 10-years-later sort-of epilogue, showing how much and how little the lead trio have changed. Yet, with some great performances and Stolevski’s unmissable formal skill, it doesn’t need to be a game-changer when it’s doing the expected stuff very, very well. Both a prodigious and prolific talent, Stolevski already has another film in the can – expect to see it at this year’s Venice Film Festival – and, if he can keep firing out stuff of this consistent quality at this kind of pace, we’re in for a very rich career.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 