Film review

  • Departures

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lloyd Eyre-Morgan, Neil Ely (2025)

    It won’t win as many Oscars as Anora but Departures has even more f**ks in it, verbal and physical – pro rata anyway.  Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely’s self-funded film, screening at BFI Flare after premiering earlier this month at the Manchester Film Festival, lasts only 82 minutes, compared with Sean Baker’s movie’s 139.  Concision is one of this British sex story’s several virtues – one reason why I think it’s superior to laurelled Anora.  Departures is also better than High Tide, the film I saw at Flare a few days ago.  Both involve heartbroken protagonists – at one point in Departures, which often uses zany graphics by way of narrative comment, a little heart drawn on screen splits in two.  But Eyre-Morgan and Ely often use comedy to tell their tale, with absorbing and entertaining results.

    As well as co-directing, Lloyd Eyre-Morgan plays Benji, the lead role in Departures and its voiceover narrator. Thirty-something, working-class Mancunian Benji is not in a good place.  Early on, he summarises his present routine as ‘drink, f**k, grindr’.  He lives at home with his mother, Janet (Lorraine Stanley).  In her younger days, Janet was more of a mess than Benji is now but she’s impatient for him to buck up:  if she’s going to have a gay for a son, she says, she wants at least a happy gay – and one with a better job than door-to-door calling on behalf of what Janet calls ‘save the pigeons’.  Benji does his part-time work for a bird charity in the company of Ryan (Tyler Conti), who pitches more confidently but is liable to insult potential supporters if they get difficult.  Benji occasionally fantasises about Ryan being gay but knows he isn’t.  Jake (David Tag), the he-man Benji gets talking with in an airport bar while they’re waiting for a delayed flight to Amsterdam, is a different matter.

    Departures is mainly the story, told in flashback, of Benji’s ‘toxic’ (the film’s blurb’s word) relationship with Jake.  The relationship has ended but Benji can’t get it out of his head or heart.  From the moment he sees Jake, Benji longs for him to be ‘a bit gay’ but can’t be sure that he is.  Jake boasts about his success with women; the first sex action in Amsterdam sees him with a female prostitute and Benji, at Jake’s invitation, watching them in bed together.  It’s not long, though, before the two men have sex with each other and it’s Jake’s idea that they fix up another weekend in Amsterdam, which soon happens.  Professing disbelief when Benji says he’s not had sex since they last met, Jake claims to have slept with ten women in the meantime.  After more bedroom action, which Benji summons the nerve to describe as gay sex, Jake insists it’s ‘just a bit of fun’.  Even when the Amsterdam visits turn into a monthly event Jake dismisses the suggestion that he’s gay.  He’s in every sense the dominant partner in the relationship:  ‘it’s not gay,’ he insists, ‘if you’re doing the shagging’.

    Jake also tells Benji – at least Benji tells us – that he’s a personal trainer to footballers, ‘which means he’s dead rich’.  Their Amsterdam base is a sleek apartment that Jake presumably owns (to have such regular access to the place).  He pays Benji’s air fares and all their other expenses in Amsterdam.  This is the upside of Jake’s control of the relationship, which is conducted entirely on his terms.  There’s to be no contact between him and Benji when they’re in the UK.  Often verbally cruel, Jake sometimes gets physically rough with Benji, too.  Benji, in two ways, gets hurt and, also in two ways, is overpowered by Jake – infatuated, incredulous that this seeming alpha male is intimate with a sad sack like him.  Why is Jake aggressively controlling?  Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely dramatise his backstory.  Jake, as a teenager (Jacob Partali), abandoned by his single-parent father, received practical sex education chiefly through his ‘Auntie’ Jackie (Kerry Howard), who moved in when the father moved out, and her fellow sex worker.

    As you watch this episode, you may start wondering if what’s on the screen actually happened or reflects what Jake told Benji about his past or is Benji’s invention.  Departures is Benji’s account of events and he could be an unreliable narrator but the directors use that possibility effectively and with integrity.  Introducing Jake’s ‘toxic origin story’, Benji admits wanting to find excuses for him.  We’re shown a low-key romantic moment between the two men in Amsterdam; Benji’s voiceover immediately acknowledges this is what he wishes had happened rather than what did happen.  As their affair goes from bad to worse, attention switches to Jake’s home in England – and evidence, through his relationship with Olivia (Saira Choudry), that he’s a bit straight as well as a bit gay.  At first, you think the Jake-Olivia scenes too may just be figments of Benji’s jealous imagination.  They become more real when Benji turns up at the couple’s home, even though Jake, shocked and furious, gets rid of him before there’s any kind of confrontation with Olivia.  (I’m not sure how Benji tracks Jake down, given the latter’s determination to exclude him from his life in England, but let that pass.)

    At one point, well into their time together in Amsterdam, Benji asks Jake to quantify his straight vs gay sex lives as percentages:  Jake concedes ’70-30’.  Yet Departures doesn’t turn into a series of incremental admissions from Jake along the road to accepting and admitting that he’s wholly queer.  In what Benji announces as their final meeting, in a deserted lay-by, Jake is unimpressed by Benji’s tearful misery, telling him he should be grateful (‘You’ve had a good run – now f*** off’).  This is seemingly not their last meeting, though.  The flashbacks finally over, the narrative moves forward.  On a plane to Amsterdam, Benji sees Jake, Olivia and the child they now have.  Jake sees Benji too but fixes his eyes elsewhere and nothing gets said.  Benji doesn’t mind now.  He’s sitting across the aisle with a new partner:  Kieran (Liam Boyle), whom Benji initially picked up with the idea of quick sex, soon made it clear he was interested in friendship of a more nuanced kind – something he and Benji now look to have developed.  Whether or not this last plane sequence is real, it’s unrealistically neat but it’s also, as a summing up of Benji’s story, emotionally true.

    The cast’s CVs seem unusual for a film festival offering, LGBTQIA+ or otherwise.  They’re actors usually seen on television, rarely in starring roles, often in soaps:  over the years, Saira Choudry, David Tag and Tyler Conti have all done substantial stints in Hollyoaks – so has Liam Byrne in Emmerdale.  Lloyd Eyre-Morgan’s varied list of directing credits on IMDb are in cinema as well as TV, but they include a fair bit of EastEnders.  Eyre-Morgan’s acting credits are much fewer, which makes his portrait of Benji more remarkable, never mind that he’s drawing on personal experience (see below) to play the role.  All the other actors mentioned in this paragraph do well, along with Jacob Partali, Kerry Howard and Olly Rhodes (the teenage Benji).  David Tag is outstanding as alarmingly conflicted Jake:  one minute, he’s accompanying himself on a guitar to a wimpy song that he’s composed; the next, he’s a scathing, yelling tyrant.  I don’t know if Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely, and their fellow producer Paul Mortlock (who was also Departures‘ cinematographer) were able to afford an intimacy co-ordinator on their low-budget enterprise.  Perhaps they got by on trust built up with the actors concerned – Lloyd Eyre-Morgan’s own extensive involvement in the sex scenes must surely have helped with that.  (Another echo of Anora there.)  However they did it, the directors’ achievement in getting such natural performances, especially David Tag’s, is no mean feat.

    ‘This film is inspired by all the d**kheads that f**ked us over,’ announces text at the start of Departures, ‘You know who you are’.  This and the graphics, which certainly make the opening part of the narrative distinctive, seem to express also the directors’ anxiety not to lose your attention for a moment.  (They lost mine a few times but only because Benji goes to strobe-lit clubs.)  As the story gathers momentum, the graphic decoration eases off.  Rather in the same way, early sex scenes are scored to Classic FM-type numbers, including a jokey (predictable) burst of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’; once the film gains more confidence, this is replaced by modern pop and rock that feels more individual.  In one bit in Amsterdam, Benji, Jake-less for the weekend, seeks out sex elsewhere in the city – a grim episode that’s untypically protracted.  For the most part, Benji’s sex encounters are quickies in more ways than one – their comic-sketch quality chimes with Benji’s desperate promiscuity, and his humour.  His potty-mouth wit is a weapon – aimed at himself, as well as other people – and an armour.  Departures is clearly designed as an if-you-didn’t-laugh-you’d-cry story and succeeds on those terms.  It’s often very funny.

    29 March 2025

  • Flow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Straume

    Gints Zilbalodis (2024)

    U certificate – ‘very mild threat’.  Very mild??  In the Latvian animated film Flow, the threat is nearly continuous, often life-endangering.  It starts in a forest landscape:  a variety of animals, trying to escape rapidly rising flood waters, hurtle or scrabble towards higher ground.  In the struggle for survival that follows, the central character is a cat; the main supporting cast comprises a Labrador, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur and a secretary bird.  The BBFC clearly takes the view that, if there are no human beings on the receiving end of a threat, it can’t amount to much.

    The line-up does mean, though, that Gints Zilbalodis’s film is my kind of animation film – one featuring animals rather than people.  Better still, these animals aren’t required to speak human dialogue.  I talked all the time to our cats and liked to think we had conversations but, when it comes to talking animals on screen, my literal-mindedness usually gets in the way – especially when their words are spoken by vocally recognisable actors.  (The first two Paddington films are an exception, thanks to the amazing chemistry of Paul King’s bear and Ben Whishaw’s voice.  I also enjoyed Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) – more for the vocal performances than the story, though the stop-motion miniatures and the overall design show Wes Anderson at his most fruitfully meticulous.)  Flow is far from a silent picture, however.  As proof of the threat levels, the cat repeatedly mews in alarm.  I didn’t really think Zilbalodis and his co-writer, Matīss Kaža, would let their protagonist perish by drowning or falling from a great height or as prey to hostile secretary birds (the main one in the story is nicer).  Even so, it’s a close shave on all three counts and the miaowing is worryingly credible.  Most of the time, the anxious cat’s saucer-like eyes aren’t much different from the lemur’s.

    Those feline eyes are somewhat stylised but Zilbalodis’s recreation of animal movements and attitudes is, for the most part, wonderfully well-observed – for the cat and the dogs (the Labrador has several sidekicks of other breeds), at any rate:  I’ll take it on trust that the same goes for the lemur and the capybara.  I especially recognised, and enjoyed, the cat’s momentary hesitation just before each of its many leaps.  There’s also a whale in evidence; it saves the cat’s life more than once but eventually lies beached in the forest (or whatever the equivalent of beached is elsewhere on dry land) and the cat lies beside the great creature, rubbing the side of its head against the whale and purring.  The detail of the animal animation is so engrossing that you almost take for granted Zilbalodis’s rendering of landscape but this is marvellous, too – not least the quality of light, particularly light shining through trees and water.  Although the geographical setting isn’t specific, it struck me as vaguely oriental:  massive cat statuary in a deserted garden; a couple of dogs with a Chinese look about them; Japanese phrases in the film’s music, composed by Zilbalodis and Rihards Zaļupe.

    For much of Flow’s eighty-five minutes, the animals’ salvation takes the form of a small, unmanned boat that stays above water – a kind of mini-ark sans Noah.  As suggested by the altruistic or affectionate behaviour already mentioned, the motley crew in Flow look out for each other – or learn to do so.  The allegorical import of the piece isn’t too hard to work out.  The diluvial effects of climate change, hostilities between different tribes of the animal kingdom – both could hardly be more salient in the narrative.  Gints Zilbalodis himself probably summed up his message as well as anyone in his acceptance speech when Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature last month – ‘We are all in the same boat.  We must work together and try to overcome our differences.’  In the last scene, the animals sit together, all pals, and look at their reflections in the water.  There are moments when the film is on the brink of sentimentality but it stays the right side.  Raising the spirits, Flow does get its audience to higher ground.

    25 March 2025

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