Directors: Neil Ely, Lloyd Eyre-Morgan
Writer: Lloyd Eyre-Morgan
Stars: Lloyd Eyre-Morgan, David Tag, Liam Boyle
Synopsis: Benji encounters Jake at an airport gate, sensing attraction. Their relationship unfolds through Amsterdam trips and intimacy, revealing complex power dynamics.
It’s extremely lonely when you feel that you are unloveable, or when you feel that you deserve to be treated poorly by someone else in a relationship. There are healthy relationships where one partner is dominant and the other submissive, but those are based on respect and consent. Any other form of this is emotional and physical abuse. To watch someone live in this cycle of toxic partnerships is painful and aggravating. It’s very hard to watch Departures for this reason.
The film is billed as a comedy. There are several funny scenes and lines, but the humor of the story is heavily carried by the narration and Benji’s (Lloyd Eyre-Morgan) point of view shots as well as a few fantasy sequences. Even with those, though, the film feels like it’s a friend who is finally ready to open up about a terrible relationship, describing the bad circumstances they’ve been living with while laughing as you sit in open mouthed horror. The funny moments never supersede these awful, depressing images.
That is the point that writer, co-director, and star Lloyd Eyre-Morgan is trying to make. His script is meant to evoke the hindsight that comes from the other side of a truly toxic relationship. In seeing Benji’s pain played out in the order and way he wants to show us, Benji is showing us an equation for comedy. Pain plus time equals laughter. We all have painful memories we can laugh about now or at least tell so that they don’t affect us negatively any more. Those incongruities can make for something funny in the long run. Yet, even the funny bits are a bit dull.
The bits and quips can’t overpower the sadness in watching someone self-destruct. If it has a comparison, it’s like watching a film with a drug addict as the main character. They continuously use and it becomes far too painful to watch. Benji’s self-loathing in constantly chasing anonymous sex in order to feel something after his break up with Jake (David Tag) serves the story that the filmmakers want to tell, but is just not engrossing. It’s a turn off in many ways to just see the spiral, but never feel that there is a way out. Even when there appears to be a way out, it feels tentative and too much like the toxicity will seep back in.
What Departures has going for it is an excellent depiction of the ugliness of internalized homophobia. In the flashbacks we see Jake as both bully and bullied. His relationship to queerness is that it is his weakness, pure and simple. He engages in it with his trysts with Benji, but can’t bring himself to speak about it, to enjoy it, or label it. In flashbacks we learn how he was rejected completely by his family, not for queerness, just because of their own selfishness. This translates into his constant chasing of multiple partners, none of whom know that there is anyone else. Jake’s loathing seeps out of him into every relationship he has and means he’ll never truly be happy.
It’s the same with Benji. While he knows he’s gay and is out of the closet, he still feels as if he has to be punished for it. He picks the worst men for himself because they will make him feel bad for being himself. He’s got such a deep self-loathing that the poison the men in his life spew at him feels like an antidote for his own hatred. It’s an external confirmation of what he’s always believed, that he’s not worthy or worth anything.
Departures is a difficult watch. It’s not meant to be. The filmmakers may have intended something more balanced. It’s likely that there will be people for whom this film rings true. It’s likely they will see themselves in this film and get some satisfaction about being on the other side of it. Though, it’s likely that this comedy is just too depressing for the rest of us to want to sit with. It’s definitely not a film for those that want a light send up of toxic relationships.
