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JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS OF AN AGE
After suffering through 2022’s double abortion of director Nicholas Stoller’s “Bros” and Andrew Ahn’s “Fire Island” — ludicrously mislabeled “rom-coms" when they were just cringey excuses to wallow in regressive gay minstrelsy — it’s a huge relief to report that in the past few weeks I’ve seen a full quintet of deep, and deeply felt, films about men, both gay and straight, involved in life changing relationships: Lukas Dhont’s heartrending “Close," Carter Smith’s body-horror thriller “Swallowed," Craig Boreham’s sex-forward “Lonesome," Maryam Touzani’s gentle and forgiving “The Blue Caftan” and best of all, Stolevski’s youthful love epic “Of An Age." Of course these are all indie or international films since the level of intimacy on display is something that Hollywood — always reaching for the widest margin and the lowest bar — is simply incapable of portraying, and likely would not, even if it could. Real, deep-connection closeness is not in Hollywood’s playbook anymore. When the blockbuster is your raison d'être, intimate and honest feelings just slow things down. These days, by design, studio movies are built to be as comforting and safe as one of those crackling fireplace videos that are so popular around the holidays. They may be inviting but they don’t give off any heat. Besides, audiences have been militantly trained to eschew anything raw, unsettling or emotionally vibrant so they can embrace a much-simpler-to-churn-out prefabricated, acrylic facsimile. They no longer want things to resonate. They want innocuous and banal popcorn-friendly ersatz emotion so that the forgetting process can begin even before the movie’s over. And for God’s sake don’t try and show them anything with teeth or truth in it. They’ve been chugging Tang Orange Drink Mix so long they actually prefer it to the real thing. Just look at last year’s top ten money making domestic films. Is it a coincidence they’re all sequels, and that seven out of ten include a big fat COLON in the title? Could there be a more apt metaphor for the current state of American popular culture?
Luckily, for the those who require more than potty-training from a trip to the cinema, Goran Stolevski is here to give us something visceral to feel.
“Of An Age” is about two boys, Adam (Thom Green) in his 20’s and openly gay, and Kol (Elias Anton), a closeted teenager, who meet and fall in love during a long, sweaty car ride through the Australian countryside. The ride involves a free-form, yet gorgeously structured, conversation in which both boys find they speak a common, private language of elliptical flirtation and simmering desire. And this tennis game of exploration and revelation never runs out of oxygen to feed its inventiveness or ability to delight. This kind of meet-cute banter scene has been done hundreds of times before, but never this successfully — at least not in a gay film. And, huge surprise, there’s no camping or bitchy repartee. No tired gay tropes get dragged out for our eye-rolling displeasure: these fellows actually talk about literature and philosophy! It’s a constantly engaging and genuinely funny dance of interaction between two boys falling head over heels for each other. And the actors are exquisite. Stolevski brings us in so close to their experience — he serves as his own editor and his work is phenomenal — we can practically feel the heat of the car, the palpable electricity of their charged-up pheromones and the smell of their sweat. And every exchange, every look, every shared laugh brings us deeper into the heart of what’s happening onscreen until it feels as if we’re the ones falling in love.
Then, knowing full well how richly he’s planted the aching anticipation of “what comes next” in the minds and bodies of the audience, Stolevski takes his sweet time bringing the two would-be lovers to their inevitable clinch. His imaginative mapping of the emotionally reticent narrative beats inherent in the ‘coming-out’ story — with their push and pull of secrecy, denial and guilt, the fear of discovery and the uncertainty of an uncharted future — takes us through a series of vivid riffs on the idea of delayed gratification, building towards an overwhelming anticipation of physical contact. In this, “Of An Age” is similar to Brazilian director Marco Berger’s slow burn masterpiece “Hawaii” (2013) which, in a version of extreme psychological foreplay, postpones the physical release of a single kiss until literally the last second of the film. Stolevski doesn’t make us wait that long for the friction of men’s bodies to start. But we barely have time to enjoy the postcoital glow before a time limit — right out of Vincent Minelli’s wartime romance “The Clock” — is placed on the affair, and the heartbreak of missed connections and impending goodbyes bring more than a few opportunities for genuine cathartic release. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that many people crying in a movie theatre. And not from manipulation — no hectoringly weepy strings or amped up emotions here — but from the aching recognition of what the highs — and inevitable lows — of the experience of being in love can do to a person. It’s a deft, immersive, gorgeous and unforgettable addition to the canon of heartbreaking queer romance stories. Harold Bloom wrote a book about Shakespeare called “The Invention of the Human” where he posits the idea that through his plays, Shakespeare presents such a complete portrait of what it means to be alive that he, in effect, created what we refer to as “human nature."
I know Stolevski is still young. It’s probably too soon to conjecture that what he’s done here is along the lines of “reinventing the human," though his film is such a balm of authentic redemption amid a sea of mediocre generalities, it certainly feels that way at times. Yes, he’s only 36 years old. And he has only two feature films to his credit. But what amazing films they are. Through their microscopic examinations of the moment-to-moment experience of falling in and out of love, of the discovery of humanity within, and the painful reality of loss, they gently, but definitively, remind us what it’s like to be alive. IN THEATERS
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His follow up to last year’s terrific debut “You Won’t Be Alone,” 36-year-old auteur Goran Stolevski’s sophomore film “Of An Age” is a gay coming-of-age love story that sets a high bar for cinematic intimacy. 
