Goran Stolevski is an extremely talented filmmaker who lives Down Under but is originally from Macedonia. He gets the details so damn right it just boggles the mind. In “Of An Age,” for example, one of the characters is an Australian who is moving to Brazil or somewhere in South America to get a master’s degree. The other is a Serb who wants to win a dance contest. The Australian tends to listen to salsa music while the Serb dances to Azucar Moreno’s Bandido. This song won the Eurovision contest of 1990 and it was a huge massive hit in Serbia, but less so elsewhere. Why people in The Balkans took to it is sort of a mystery to me. But it’s the fact that this young Serb is dancing to it is what makes this director so great.
Anyway, I didn’t mean this to be about how much I like his previous movie, this movie is a total surprise in that it takes place in North Macedonia and is largely about a made up family of LGBQT people. Dita is a professional and the working half of a relationship where the other woman stays home to raise her two daughters. There is a gay man involved and he is the beard, literally, to the women, pretending to be the husband to one of them. He has a lot of lovers but finds one that “sticks” so to speak. The mother of the daughters dies and it’s known from the beginning that she is going to die. But Dita does not want to raise the children. So this is where the conflict begins and even though I can’t tell at this point, all the ups and downs of the plot, because I’ve forgotten, you believe it in its entirety. The closet is (being in the closet) is almost another character in the movie because of deep rooted homophobia which, maybe not ironically, seems to get worse as you move the West side of Europe to the Eastern part on the way to Russia. Even though I utterly and fully support Ukraine, I’ve seen a lot of videos where those soldiers are calling Russian prisoners faggots and the like. In this movie, that danger is always there: it’s almost the villain.
There have been so many wonderful foreign movies that take place in these distant (for Americans) settings. It’s uplifting to see them coming into their own while our movies keep declining into Pixar-ish cartoons about germs and constantly self-referencing super hero tripe.