The Bittersweet Sting of First Love in "Of An Age"
Goran Stolevski's second film is an aching, poignant tribute to the perils and pleasures of queer love.
I first fell in love with another guy when I was 13. We’d been friends for years but, on a certain day in 1998, the dynamic between us changed, and I’ve never been the same since. On that day, I walked into class and, for some reason I still can’t quite understand, I knew, as certainly as I’ve ever known anything in my life, that I was in love with him. For years afterward, through high school and into college and beyond, I carried a flame for my friend and, while I never told him how I felt–and thus my desires remained unrequited–he remained my first love, the person against whom I measured all subsequent relationships, for better and for worse.
When I first heard about Of an Age, the sophomore effort from director Goran Stolevski, I knew it was going to be one of those films which struck a deep chord with me. Set in 1999, it follows Elias Anton’s Nikola “Kol” Denic as he sets out with Thom Green’s Adam Donegal to rescue Ebony, Elias’ best friend and Adam’s sister, after she wakes up hungover on a beach. What begins as a bit of a road trip turns into something far more magical and meaningful, as the two men feel the spark of desire. And, though they consummate their feelings in a passionate erotic encounter, it is doomed to be fleeting, as Adam is set to leave for graduate school abroad the next morning. When they reconnect over a decade later at Ebony’s wedding, they have to confront what the evening meant for both of them and how the intervening years have changed them…and how they haven’t.
From the moment that Adam and Kol meet, it’s clear that there’s a connection. It’s there in the glances they steal at one another, in the way that they spar, learning more about one another in the process. Adam takes a little sadistic pleasure in teasing Kol about everything from the proper pronunciation of the name “Borges” to his outfit (he was supposed to participate in a prestigious dance final with Ebony, before her partying threw a wrench in the works). Kol, for his part, is equal parts preening and shy under the older man’s gaze, even as he is desperately eager to impress him (to which end he references his reading of such literary giants as Borges and Kafka).
A significant portion of the first half of the film takes place in the car, and Stolevski's use of tight framing and a small aspect ratio encourages a sense of intimacy, inviting us as viewers to experience the same physical closeness as the characters do. This carries over into the moment when the two finally give into their desires and, like the best of queer cinema, Of An Age is as much about intimacy as it is about lust. You can almost feel their fingers as they dance across flesh, the air simmering with a heat even more visceral and overwhelming than the Australian heat. This is Kol’s first time with another man, and the scene has all of the urgency and sweetness one would expect from such an encounter. There is a languid urgency to their movements; it’s one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen in a film.
But, as is so often the case with queer films (and, it must be said, queer life), their romance, fulfilling and life-changing as it might be, can only ever be ethereal, ephemeral. As with other notable queer films about longing–including Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, to which Of An Age has been compared by almost every critic writing about it–much as we, and the characters, might wish for these two young men to spend their lives together, we know it can’t be. Adam must leave, and Kol has his own journey to take. This gives their erotic encounter a particularly bittersweet sting, and the film excels at capturing what Coleman Spilde of The Daily Beast has referred to as the “haunting ecstasy of first love.”
It would be tempting to say that this is all a bit one-sided, that their dalliance means more to Kol than it does to Adam, for the latter knows from the beginning that it can only ever be a one-night stand. Yet it’s clear from their parting that this is a wrenching experience for the older youth, too, and his whispered plea to let Kol walk him to his front door–which Kol declines, out of fear that his family will see and ask uncomfortable questions–tells us a great deal about how much he has already begun to invest in this encounter, this “beautiful boy.” His whispered insistence that Kol will find someone reads as wishful thinking on his part, a desperate, even feverish desire not to hurt this person with whom he has shared an extraordinary evening.
Fast forward to 2010, and the two reconnect at Ebony’s wedding. The intervening years seem to have changed them both: Kol has matured from the gangly, awkward youth of 2009 into a young muscle hunk, while Adam seems a little sadder, though he still has something of the effortless swagger of his youth (as well as that mischievous twinkle that never seems to leave his gleaming eyes). Most importantly, Adam has since gotten married, and this revelation strikes Kol like a bolt of lightning, particularly since it is revealed by one of the other party guests rather than Adam himself. He spends the rest of the wedding drinking and indulging in his own misery before finally dancing–in a very erotic and suggestive way–with Ebony, a clear invocation of their missed dance recital years earlier and an effort to keep Adam’s attention.
Finally, after circling each other, they finally have the necessary conversation. More than anything else, Kol wants to know whether Adam is happy (the latter’s tears as Kol speaks, as well as his admission that his husband hasn’t attended the wedding because he’s on a business trip, suggest that he isn’t) because, for him, life froze on that extraordinary evening. While he counts himself lucky that he had this experience that no one else has had–after all, only he has had Adam in that particular way, on that particular night–no other boy he’s been with has ever made him feel the same. Anyone who has ever spent a lifetime chasing the high of first love, only to find themselves disappointed, will feel this admission of Kol’s cut them to the quick. The soulfulness of Anton’s delivery, filled with a throbbing emotion that almost seems to choke him, and Adam’s anguished sobs, capture the anguish of love perpetually deferred. Time, for Kol, hasn’t moved forward. He has remained in that beautiful, exquisite moment of his youth, like a dragonfly trapped in amber.
All is not lost for these lovers, however, for they ultimately return to Kol’s hotel room. “I don’t wanna fuck,” he says, and so they simply hold one another, choosing intimacy over simple carnality. This ending is, I think, evocative of Moonlight, which similarly focused on two men finding a strange sort of comfort in simply touching one another. Adam’s last words, “My beautiful boy,” serve as a nostalgic, bittersweet reminder of the night they spent together so many years before. They have now come full-circle, though what the future holds remains far from unclear.
Indeed, the brilliance of this conclusion lies in its ambiguity. There is, to be sure, a bit of closure in seeing these two reconnect after so many years apart, particularly since Kol, like Moonlight’s Chiron, has spent years chasing the sensation he had with Adam, only to come up short every time. Perhaps Adam will realize that he is unhappy in his current marriage and at last be with his beautiful boy, and the two will set out on a brave new journey, with the great vistas opened up by the 2010s. Or perhaps, more tragically, this will be yet another interlude for the both of them, a chance reconnection that, like their earlier encounter, will be fleeting. (You can guess which one I would prefer).
Of An Age is one of those queer films which manages to feel deeply profound, despite its relatively slender narrative and the seemingly small stakes. Anyone who has ever had the kind of experience Kol has knows that first love can be very powerful, casting a spell it can sometimes be impossible to shake. To quote Spilde again: “Some connections have a time clock, no matter how badly we don’t want them to end. What happens if (or maybe, inevitably, when) we become stuck on them? Love—like its bedfellow, grief—can bruise you forever if you don’t know how to handle its power. Even then, sometimes you have no choice but to stay in its grip until you’re beyond black and blue, flush with red-hot rapture all over.” Of An Age asks us to sit with our feelings and our desires, to look back at our own lives and to reflect on those connections which have left their marks on us, a bittersweet arrow wound, destined never to fully heal.
In the years since I first fell in love, I’ve maintained an enduring bond with my friend. I still see him as often as I can when I go back to visit my family in West Virginia and, though I’ve long since made peace with the fact that I’ll never be with him, there will always be a part of me that wonders: what if? What if I’d told him how I felt all of those years ago, consequences be damned? Would things have been different? Would I have felt better, just knowing that he understood the truth of my feelings?
When I watch a film like Of an Age, I feel stung, pierced, even wounded, in a way that I find difficult to put into coherent words (much as I am trying to do so with this little essay). However, it must be said that I have a different relationship to it than I might have had I seen this film a decade ago. Back then, like Kol I was convinced that no encounter would ever measure up to what I’d felt when I first fell in love. Had I see Of An Age in, say, 2009, I would have felt even more devastated than I did in 2023, precisely because it would have struck so much at how I was even then trying to make sense of my romantic past, present, and future.
Watching Of An Age in the present, however, I realized the deeper, more profound importance of that day back in 1998. It’s not just that it marked the moment when I first fell in love; it also marked the moment when I truly knew what love was. I’d had crushes and erotic attraction before, of course, but it was in that moment, when my stomach turned over and I felt light-headed, that I knew what it was to feel eros in all of its terrifying, bruising, violent power. Nothing could ever measure up to that moment or be the same because first love is just that, the first. It’s an experience in time that can never be recaptured, no matter how much we might wish it were otherwise.
“What happens when the coming-of-age story becomes the story of our lives?” asks Richard Scott Larson of Slant Magazine. It’s a question Of An Age wrestles with, and it’s one which occurs to me ever more frequently as I approach middle-age. I no longer look back at that first love as something I want to recapture in the present. Instead, I’ve come to accept, as Kol will eventually have to do if he’s to have any hope of happiness in his life, that each love we encounter will be different than the one in the past. Yes, his experience with Adam was something “transcendent and unparalleled,” but he, like me, will have to truly accept that he must move on, either with the Adam of the present or some other man, someone who can love him as he deserves.
It’s one of life’s hardest, most brutal lessons, but it is also one of its most necessary. Of An Age leaves us with a one last beautiful moment shared between two kindred spirits, enmeshed in the beauty, and the heartache, of first love.