Cinema might have progressed beyond burying its gays but that doesn’t mean it can’t assign them a fate worse than death – lifelong pining. This is so prevalent in culture that it has its own term: queer yearning, an achey, all-consuming desire in which years of repression spill forth into a crush so forbidden, so unquenchable, that the only way to relieve its pains is by penetrating a peach.
Hurtling into this lineage is the Macedonian-Australian film-maker Goran Stolevski’s Of an Age, a pinwheeling, decade-spanning odyssey of teenage kicks and their prolonged aftershocks. And I mean hurtling: from the off, Stolevski’s direction possesses the same frantic kineticism as the Safdie brothers’, inducing all the stomach-churning anxiety of Uncut Gems – and then some.
