REVIEW: ‘Of An Age’ Is Timeless

In one of his most famous songs, “Taxi,” upon running into an old love named Sue, Harry Chapin says, “I learned about love in the back of a Dodge/The lesson hadn’t gone too far.” I always thought of this lyric as tragic because I lamented Harry having loved but lost. That lyric has always pained me—I too have learned more about love in the back of cars than maybe anywhere else in my life. But today I learned a hard truth in the back row of a near-empty movie theater. Maybe the lesson didn’t go far not because Harry and Sue didn’t last, but because Harry never moved on from the Dodge and never took what he learned about love and applied it elsewhere. To anyone who has ever been schooled in love in a station wagon and left all their lessons on the back seat, Of an Age is for you.

Of an Age is a romance by Macedonian-Australian director and writer Goran Stolevski about Kol (Elias Anton), a recent high school graduate who meets Adam (Thom Green) while trying to help his sister, Ebony (Hattie Hook), who is Kol’s dance partner, out of a tight spot in time for their dance final. Over an intense 24 hours of meeting, learning about, and saying goodbye to each other, Kol’s life is changed forever. The movie takes place in two parts, the first two-thirds or so in 1999 when Kol and Adam first meet, and the rest in 2010 upon their reunion.

I won’t describe Of an Age as either a heartbreaker or swooning because it is neither. It is simply raw. It’s as real a romance as I can remember experiencing, probably because I see myself so desperately in Kol. He starts the movie so desperate to have something more than the life he’s living, but he doesn’t even fully grasp that. It’s spending an hour in the car with Adam that awakens him to not only the potential of his sexuality but more so, the potential of his entire being.

He’s having an intimate conversation on a level Ebony could never give him. He’s revealing truths about himself to Adam and to himself with every sentence he utters, every joke he cracks, every lie he tells and admits to it doesn’t. It’s a very dialogue-heavy film, taking place more than anywhere in the confined space of a moving car with extremely close-up back-and-forth shots between the two characters’ faces as they talk with one another.

Anybody who has ever fallen in love in a car understands the importance of this claustrophobic approach to cinematography. You watch as the sun rises and falls. Darkness creeps in and fades away during single shots and whole conversations. Time passes, but time is also in the distance, outside of what spellbinds these two together in close and intimate quarters. Glances dart all over one another’s bodies and the feeling of breathing down one another’s necks is constant while the cameras work from different angles each time they enter the car. It transported me viscerally to every moment I’ve ever spent in the same intimate vehicular circumstance, for better and for worse.

It’s also very firmly planted in its two time periods, in terms of its strong costuming, its dialogue, and the way these two gay men move about in the world in either period. Yet, there’s also a timelessness to the movie that keeps things from feeling too much like a period piece and more like an evergreen story. Where at first there were some moments where the movie seemed like it could veer too much into being a coming-out story locked into a certain place and time, the concern quickly dissipates as the setting tightens itself around Adam’s car and everything outside of his and Kol’s world stopped mattering quite as much.

Of an Age is a movie that took me through every emotion associated with self-awakening and falling in love. It has moments of great humor, absolutely awkward conversations, and pieces of intimacy, fear, anger, outrage, disappointment, and vast infatuation and adoration all within less than two hours. Knowing that the time skip is coming because of title cards, the opening scene, and every time I’ve seen the trailer for the movie meant that I was prepared for how the first act would surely end, but nothing could have prepared me for how the movie concludes.

The lesson of most romances is the same: persistence wins the day and love that’s meant to be will always be in the end. Of an Age is almost not a romance in this way. It’s not interested in whether two people in love deserve to be together. Its lesson is much, much harder learned than that. It has the most incredible final scene, with three simple words shattering me not because it’s sad or because it’s happy, but simply because the moment is so unbearably true and important.

Of an Age wants you to understand that the lesson must go further than just the moment you learn it in. You can’t spend your life captured on a carousel of relived images from a single moment in time, no matter how precious. You have to carry them to a life beyond the back of that car, or you’ll be stuck “taking tips and getting stoned.”

I adore Of an Age not only because it so powerfully presents its thesis through impeccable dialogue and cinematography, but because it’s my own story so deeply. Its queerness and its arrested development speak to me in a way that makes it feel so personal, yet, I also believe indelibly that viewers of any experience, of any sexuality, will find in this movie both beauty and release. It’s such a well-crafted vehicle for a hard lesson about life as a whole, just as much as it’s a precious love story.

Of an Age is streaming now on Prime Video.