Of an Age and the country a 24 hour love can hold

The first Australian film I saw that had a person in it who looked like one of my cousins was Of an Age (Goran Stolevski, 2022), and I was thirty-one. I watched it on the third day of MIFF that year, in a half-full Wednesday-evening session at the Comedy Theatre, and I sat in my seat for the length of the closing credits, which is not a thing I do.

I have been trying to write about the film for three years. The reason I have been failing is that the film operates on a register of borrowed time, and the writing about it kept wanting to be about the borrowing rather than about the time.

I want to try again here, on different terms.

What the film is

Of an Age is a two-act picture, a 24 hour first act and a much later second act, both built around a single afternoon and night in suburban Melbourne in 1999. Kol, a Macedonian-Australian seventeen-year-old played by Elias Anton, is preparing to compete in a ballroom dance final and his partner has not arrived. Her older brother Adam, played by Thom Green, drives Kol around the western suburbs to find her. They do not find her in time. They miss the competition. They drive instead, across one summer night, the boy and the older brother, and what happens between them is the film. The second act picks up the same characters eleven years later, in a different city, on the eve of a wedding. They have spent eleven years apart. They have approximately three hours together before one of them flies out.

The film is not, I want to say, an immigrant film in the bracketed sense the festival circuit usually means by the term. It does not stage Kol’s Macedonian background as a problem to be solved by white acceptance. It does not narrate the inheritance for an outsider audience. The Macedonian is in the film the way English is in the film, which is to say it is in the kitchen of Kol’s house, in the music played at his cousin’s family party, in the cadence of his mother’s questions, in the particular way his cousin Ebony asks him, in shorthand and without translation, whether he has eaten. The film does not subtitle the kitchen. The film trusts the kitchen.

What it photographs

Cinematographer Matthew Chuang, who has since done You Won’t Be Alone and the Asian-Australian feature Limbo, photographed the film on Super 16mm in a fixed 4:3 frame. The decision was Stolevski’s, from a Senses of Cinema interview he gave at the time, and the rationale was that the boxy frame would force the two leads into the same shot rather than letting the cutting do the work. The decision is right. The pair are in the same frame for almost the entirety of the first act. They lean against the same Holden Commodore. They sit on the same bench at the Sunshine railway station. They share, in a five-minute scene I have rewatched perhaps fifteen times, a packet of melted Mars Bars in the front seat of the car, and Chuang holds the shot wide enough that you cannot, as a viewer, decide which of them you are watching.

The colour palette is the suburban Melbourne palette of late summer 1999: the bleached pink of stucco render, the dirty grey of fence-line cement, the pale yellow of the streetlamp light against the sky after the sun has gone down. The film does not romanticise the country it photographs. It does not glamourise the western suburbs. It simply photographs them at the eye-level of a person who lives in them. I want to say what I mean: the film looks like the inside of a memory, but only because the country it photographs has not been photographed enough for me to have a more accurate reference.

The 24 hours, and what they hold

The 24 hours of the first act are, at the level of plot, almost nothing. A boy who has not yet named what he is meets an older boy who has known what he is for six years. They do not, in those 24 hours, sleep together. They almost do. The film stages the almost as a sequence on the front porch of Kol’s parents’ house, after the family party, with Kol’s mother audible through the screen door. The almost is the entire emotional arc of the first act, and the film stages it with a discipline that Australian first-feature directors do not typically command. Stolevski does, because he has been writing the script for nine years and has been thinking about the porch for all of them.

What the second act does is collect the cost of the almost. Eleven years on, in Melbourne airport’s international departures lounge, the two men meet again and have three hours to do whatever they have refused to do across the eleven years of silence between them. They do not, in those three hours, recover what they did not become. The film is honest about this. It does not stage the second act as reunion. It stages it as accounting.

What the film inherits

There is a lineage here that I want to name. Tony Ayres’ Walking on Water (2002), Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004), even the Adelaide sections of The Boys Are Back (2009): a small but durable Australian tradition of intimate-scale dramas built around a single character’s specific suburban moment. Of an Age sits inside this tradition. It also sits inside a more recent diaspora-cinema tradition that has, in the last five years, started producing films in Australia that do not require translation, Top End Wedding (2019), Sweet Country (2017), Stolevski’s own Housekeeping for Beginners (2023). The Australian features of the late 2010s and early 2020s have, finally, started photographing the country I grew up in.

I want to say what I mean. I grew up on Australian films that did not have my mother in them. I do not mean that literally; my mother has never been in any film, and I would not want her to be. I mean that the country those films photographed was, for the entirety of my adolescence, one I could borrow but could not move into. Of an Age is one of perhaps four Australian films I have seen in adulthood that photograph a country I could move into without explaining myself first.

What I keep thinking about

What I keep thinking about, three years on, is the front-porch scene. The screen door. The mother audible through it. Kol’s hand against Adam’s, palm-down, on the wooden railing. The not-quite-touch held for perhaps seven seconds before Kol’s mother calls something in Macedonian through the door and the moment closes. Stolevski directs the scene as though he has been waiting nine years to direct it. He has. The film is the proof of the wait.

The film is on Stan and on iTunes. It is not, three years on, what anyone is talking about. It will be, in time. I want to say it will be in time, or rather, I want to say I will be the one talking about it until everyone else catches up.