Craig Boreham | Teenage Kicks / 2016

loving all the wrong people

by Douglas Messerli

 

Craig Boreham (screenwriter and director) Teenage Kicks / 2016

 

Australian director Craig Boreham’s feature first feature film, Teenage Kicks, is both an extension and fuller explanation of his 2009 short film, Drowning. The same figures are involved, although some of the defining events of the film move the work is slightly different directions.

    Miklós Varga (Miles Szanto), the 17-year-old son of an inattentive father and a more than guilty and neglectful mother (Anni Finsterer), is clearly in love with his best friend Dan (Daniel Webber). They smoke drugs and masturbate together while watching lesbian porn films, while Dan’s father cooks up a hearty if seemingly inedible meal in the kitchen.

      Everything might, nonetheless, be perfect if only Dan weren’t straight and determined to engage in a disastrous relationship with his wealthy girlfriend Phaedra (Charlotte Best).

      Mik, moreover, adores his older drugged-out brother Tomi (Nadim Kobessi), and is unable to resist watching him through door crack as the man masturbates. This probably is not the first time he has witnessed the act. Only this time he is caught, and Tomi, furious about the fact, and perhaps finally made fully aware of his sibling’s sexuality, goes racing off on his bicycle, with Mik, with deep a deep sense of shame and need to apologize, stealing his father’s car to follow, a ridiculous chase which ends up with Tomi being hit and killed by another driver.

    Tomi, clearly this Hungarian migrant family’s favorite, and seen as the savior of their already fractured family unit, leaves a huge gap in all their hearts, particularly for Mik, who has lost not only a sibling and friend, but a secret love.

      In his endless guilt, the young boy even vows to look after Tomi’s very pregnant girlfriend Annuska (Shari Sebbens), all the while observing his true love Dan is drifting away from him into the arms of Phaedra. Mik had dreamed that he and Dan might run away together as they had long planned.

     Even worse, Phaedra, fascinated perhaps by the relationship between Dan and Mik, and, if nothing else, aware of its erotic aspects for Mik, seduces the boy, encouraging him to masturbate her, and proving, at least to Mik, that she has no long-term interest in Dan, even if he remains blind to that fact until almost the end of the film.

     Mik drifts off into a world of further drugs, even a temporary exploration of heroin, and finally, as in the short work, almost drowns, saved by Dan, to whom Mik finally confesses his love and his painfully rejected in the act.

   The young man becomes increasingly aware that his inattentive father is not really his true progenitor; part of his mother’s and father’s disinterest in his well-being has to do with the guilt that for a short period of time in past the mother, Illona, had an affair with her husband’s brother. Mik is the son of his titular uncle.

     The increasing complexities of the plot at times slow down and even drag the emotional core of Boreham’s movie. Too often Mik is forced to pout is way through his various crises rather than actually reveal them.

     But at the end, even after Dan has realized that his relationship with Phaedra was a chimera and that his friendship with Mik was based on a love he cannot return, the young man is still ready to run away from the small world in which they are trapped. But now Mik, in his growing sense of responsibility, is not ready to leave. He has learned, finally, who he is and realizes simultaneously his familial duties. He becomes, in part, the son they always imaged Tomi to have been.

      As I wrote about the earlier short: “the film provides no solution, not even an ending. The characters and we have come to perceive the problem even if there can be no resolve. And recognizing that problem, the tragedy of the short and brilliantly filmed work has been revealed, its only purpose.”

      One might argue, of course, that he now is also trapped into a world of familial duties in which he will never be happy. And there is every reason to suspect that he may never find the full gay love he seeks. In some respects, I have to admit that I prefer the short, cryptic version of this film, whose title more clearly characterizes its point-of-view.

     Yet Szanto’s acting is so strong that one almost overlooks the fact that the actor is on the far side of 17, some 7 years after his appearance in Drowning. As Guardian critic Luke Buckmaster observes:

    

“In a demanding lead role, Szanto gives a brave baring-all performance, unpredictable but acutely balanced. He holds himself so well; the contradiction of an out of control character and an actor hitting all the right beats.”

 

     Szanto won the award for Best Performance in a Male Role at the 2017 Iris Prize festival. And some critics have favorably compared this work with Anna Kokkinos’ 1998 movie about a gay Greek migrant and his family in Head On, a film I review elsewhere in these pages.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).