Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely’s “Departures” chronicles a rocky relationship tucked away. Benji (Lloyd Eyre-Morgan) has a tendency to go for all the wrong, emotionally unavailable men, hiding his own incredibly low self-esteem. It’s classic queer syndrome, where one continually debases themselves at the slightest attention received from any probable sexual/romantic interest.
All personal ego takes a complete beating. Threaded in Eyre-Morgan’s voiceover, the film unfolds in a snappy, confessional mode. There are the classic beats of discovering and sidling towards one’s latent queerness as a teenager, hook-ups with straight guys who insist po-faced on their heterosexuality. For the gym bros, queerness is only an occasional indulgence, never to be taken seriously.
Benji has been through a slew of failed relationships that were just brief spurts. His stumbling across Jake (David Tag) is one of those happenstance encounters on a flight that seems romantic and fantastical. Suddenly, a vacation in Amsterdam turns into a passionate tryst. The two throw themselves over into a mad spiral of sex. The preceding run to the first kiss is etched hilariously and with precise attention. There’s the yearning, praying Jake is queer, a wistful cusp before things take off spectacularly. However, can their bond be considered a full-fledged relationship?
Benji desperately wants it to be one, though he tries his best to conceal the depth of his wish. However, Jake is the one dictating the terms of the equation. Jake chafes at labels of sexual orientation when Benji enquires mildly. He emphasises that the two can hang out only in Amsterdam.
Much of the film finds Benji returning time and again to Amsterdam to pursue the whirling passion, even as Jake isn’t keen on developing the relationship any further. Neither is Jake willing to introduce him in his private life. The two forge a parallel site of bliss in Amsterdam. But you can tell this is doomed, given how much hiding exists in the equation.
Naturally, this leads to teeming heartache, rejection, and utter, shattering abnegation. Benji is instructed and harped on by his family and friends to leave Jake, get away. But he cannot resist being pulled back again and again to their clandestine bubble existing outside reality’s arrangements. All illusions, nevertheless, break after a time.
The heart wishes and demands more. “Departures” can feel stinging as Benji buries his self-regard and hurls himself at Jake’s feet. The intimacy and thrill are paramount. Jake is the first one who makes Benji feel positive about his body. But this is clearly a relationship that runs solely according to Jake’s own whims and diktats. Benji’s wants are disposable, not even secondary.
Denial is as integral to queerness as the gradual gesture for self-affirmation. It’s a long, fraught, and hard-won journey wherein the queer must put aside the baggage of shame and awkwardness and inhabit their own bodies without fear and judgment. It can take a lifetime to reach that point of self-validation, the comfort in one’s skin, one’s desires.
Though the film unravels from Benji’s perspective, Tag endows Jake, especially in the latter stretches, with piercing repression. As overt and dominating as Jake might be in a secret relationship with Benji, he has to surmount a tide of internalised difference. Departures hints and then expands on the conditioning, brutal strictures of masculinity that bear heavily on both the characters. How do people grow out of such destructive patterns? When does acceptance become non-negotiable, the absolute abiding reality of the hour?
There’s a certain past both have wrestled with. One has been bullied, the other might have been from the perpetrator’s ilk. How can two such vastly different people form a relationship of intimacy? Can it even survive long and weather the vicissitudes of patriarchal imposition? Masculinity shadows every relationship, especially threatening tenderness and smashing through any unorthodox desire. But who decides what’s normative and what’s illicit? The film traverses the gulf that opens up even when individuals can recognise their desires.
Leaning into one’s queerness is often a thorny, demanding process. It asks one to remove layers and layers of prejudice and discomfort in the act of owning up. Jake isn’t prepared yet. When the real stakes surrounding his role emerge, it’s even more wrenching. Tag succeeds at suffusing his character with more anguish, chipping away at what could have appeared simply manipulative on a shallow level.
Of course, it is that, but there are also complex behavioural patterns and situational exigencies at play. Thankfully, “Departures” is wise and mature enough to acknowledge the root of the harm. But it never forgets Benji’s efforts to drag himself out of a vicious cycle. The climax is as piercing as potent with Tag and Eyre-Morgan going directly for the soul.
