We all dream of a love that will last a lifetime.
Not all of us achieve it, and even if we do, romantic longevity is a slippery concept that doesn’t always live up to expectations and which suffers from an unsettling clash between idealism and the reality of trying to sustain connected wonder through the assaulting vagaries of day-to-day-life.
In other words, it’s tough to stay in love.
But when almost 17-year-old Nikola ‘Kol’ Denic (Elias Anton), ready for a finals dance competition that is destined never to happen, has to set off to rescue his thoroughly unlikable dance partner, and toxic friend (though he’s too sweet and loyal to admit that) Ebony Donegal, played by Hattie Hook, from the beachside dregs of a big night gone wrong, he’s unexpectedly ready at the start of the luminously romantic Of an Age, for forever to come sneaking up into a blighted present.
Calling upon the older brother of Ebony, Adam Donegal (Thom Green) to come to his and Ebony’s rescue, mainly because he’s the only person anyone their age knows with a car – it’s 1999 and mobile phones aren’t thick on the ground so finding help comes down to running around to see who can help, not easy in a tight sequinned ballroom dancing outfit – all Kol is focused on is retrieving Ebony and getting to the dance comp.
It quickly becomes clear, what with all the delays and the travel time to the beach where a trashed Ebony has awoken in the light early morning surf, that that’s not going to happen, and once he let’s go of his pensiveness, Kol begins to relax in the relentlessly confident presence of Adam who has a calm assurance that stands in stark contrast to Kol’s jittery awkwardness.
As they weave their way through Melbourne, shown in all its suburban early Saturday morning glory, Adam’s cheerful ability to hold a conversation charms Kol into discussing his love of books and dance and a whole host of other things that in his hyper-macho Serbian immigrant household are ridiculed and scorned, especially by Kol’s uncle who has taken them in after the death of the young man’s father.
You get the feeling very quickly that defenses are falling in the face of Adam’s ability to validate all the things that Kol holds dear but which he has had to hold at arm’s length to keep his family (bar his caring mum) from making fun of him, and worse, at every turn.
One of those things, it turns out, is his sexuality, with Kol repressing being gay so profoundly that it takes Adam, who intuits it almost instantly, and who lets slip at just the right point, that the box of music tapes in his car are his male ex’s, to bring it forth.
Kol fights giving in to the truth of who he is, resulting in one highly amusing but revelatory scene in Of an Age where, shaken with the idea that Adam is openly gay and that he likes Adam a LOT already, Kol begins using “bro” and “man” like they are verbal talismans that will ward off the emerging truth of his sexuality.
Over a life changing trip to the beach, you see Kol go from frantic and guarded to open and charming to closed up until longing and obvious attraction takes over and he and Adam share a blissful dawn of hot, lustful, touchingly beautiful sex.
It’s everything Kol had long suppressed he wanted and when it is allowed to express itself, there’s a change that comes over the young man, a sense of a great prize found which, thanks to Adam being just a day away from flying overseas to start his PhD, is soon lost to the crushing reality of two lives pulling apart.
There’s a profound connection between the two men, an impossibly romantic coming together that warms the heart in most moving of ways but which like Kol, is tinged with bittersweet melancholy when the most wonderful thing to happen to him is taken away almost before it is fully within his grasp.
But Kol has changed, and swept up in the euphoria of finding Adam and a connection so rich and emotionally luminescent that it still fuels him 11 years later so that when the two men meet at the airport on their way to Ebony’s narcissistic wedding – she hasn’t happened and her husband-to-be is precisely who you would expect her to marry – Kol, though this is not openly expressed (you can see it in his eyes and mannerisms, brought to life by Anton’s superlatively nuanced performance), sees his long held dream come back to the fore, all the joy and possibility of that transformative moment when he was 17 coming vibrantly and hopefully alive again.
To say much more about what happens in 2010 would be to give away an ending that is every bit as longingly impactful as Of an Age‘s beginning, but it is a resolution that reflects how hopes and dreams do not always play out the way we expect.
Suffice to say, that Of an Age is really about what happens when we stop lying to ourselves and embrace the transcendent truth of who we are, and how in the life changing moment, we know we will never feel or be the same again.
It’s easy to think that the way you feel then will sweep all before it and life will have to bow to the vivaciously alive way you feel – as someone who came out only in his late 30s thanks to a life changing moment that reshaped EVERYTHING, the way Kol feels (that he has been given a treasured and unique gift), even 11 years later, resonates deeply and strongly – but it’s not always accommodating and Of an Age is refreshingly in both its reflectively quiet and thumpingly loud moments, about that sadly truthful reality.
Buoyed by superlative, emotionally pitch perfect performances, a storyline which never puts a foot wrong, either in pace or narrative substance and an understanding of how richly wonderful it is to find yourself completely unexpectedly and to give yourself permission to live your truth, Of an Age is an impossibly, lusciously romantic film, quite likely one of the most beautiful you will ever see, because it understands how much we all want a romantic forever but how that’s not always guaranteed even when our heart expands to encompass the hopefulness of a lovestruck lifetime.