OF AN AGE

Kol (Elias Anton) starts the day of the Year 12 Ballroom Finals practicing his half of a rumba in the garage. His murderous hip-thrusting conviction screams ‘out and proud!’ but this is Melbourne’s blue-collar north-east in 1999. A Serb boy gets to be at best closeted, or like Kol, in strenuous denial.

An hour before the finals, his dance partner Ebony (Hattie Hook) wakes hungover and stranded on an unknown beach. She phones Kol in a panic and sends him – billowing in ballroom gear – to retrieve her sequined gown. Kol jumps into her elder brother Adam’s (Thom Green) car, but as the traffic piles up, Adam only gets surlier, and points out there’s no chance to make it to the finals in time.

Hurtling on, Adam starts to pity his suddenly forlorn passenger, and strikes up a real conversation. He discovers the boy is unexpectedly engaging and articulate, if still green. Kol is thrilled to be conversing with a person who has a degree, watches subtitled films, is travelling to Buenos Aires tomorrow to start a doctorate, and happens to be ridiculously good-looking.

Kol is perfectly adept at maintaining a facade of precocity and sophistication until Adam casually mentions he’s gay. Kol falls into mortified silence, keen to use Ebony’s dramatic car-entrance as distraction from his thumping chest and trembling hands.

Stuck with the dance-deprived duo much of the day, Adam gets uneasy over their dynamic: Kol seems perfectly content to swallow Ebony’s frequent insults and far too ready to be exploited. Adam becomes increasingly protective of this boy with patent self-esteem and sexuality issues.

When Kol runs into Adam at a suburban party that evening, his social awkwardness is compounded by his persistent feelings for this man. Adam takes Kol for a dreamy night drive around Melbourne, nudging him toward a sense of self-acceptance. They have sex. When Adam drops him off at dawn, Kol is devastated, forced to say goodbye, barely 24 hours into the most intense mind-and-body connection he’ll ever get to experience.

Eleven years pass and Ebony’s wedding brings Kol and Adam back to Melbourne’s still-desolate north-east. It becomes clear the main reason Kol’s flown all this way is the bride’s brother rather than the bride. Adam too is palpably thrilled to reconnect, but Kol is completely undone when he discovers Adam is now happily married.

Unprepared for the decade of pent-up, lacerating heartbreak this unleashes in Kol, the two men are forced to confront the true impact of that one profound day, a decade ago