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Seen at...
Departure
- Director: Andrew Steggall
- Writer: Andrew Steggall
- Producer: Pietro Greppi; Stephanie Keelan
CGiii Comment
Andrew Steggall's feature debut, after a few decent shorts.
The (homo)sexual awakening of an adolescent boy and a mother's meltdown. When a reviewer (or anyone for that matter) says...it starts off well...you just know that it is not going to end as well as it started. Departure starts off well...
Juliet Stevenson does Juliet Stevenson...in other words, she is unstretched...even as a rather dissolute mother. On the other hand, the remarkably young-looking, Alex Lawther is amply awkward with his burgeoning sexuality. The scene with the carrot may make a few viewers wince...and provided Ms Stevenson with one of her two killer lines. Mothers know everything that goes on under the family roof.
Now, you would be forgiven in thinking...this was a story about a teenage boy who has a crush on an older teenage boy...and, it is...with the will it happen, won't it happen underpinning the entire structure...that is, until the script takes it to a different place entirely...into the middle-aged, middle-classed Mother's misery. It then falls apart and limps - lamely - to its flaccid conclusion.
The unrealised (i.e. squandered) potential of the film is a minor tragedy in itself.
Middle-class misery in the South of France is a far cry from financial desolation in Deptford. With neither empathy nor sympathy being earned, Steggall's debut feature flounders, somewhat fatally...it should have been all about him (the lip-lusting son)...not her (the loose-lipped mother)!
Trailer...
The(ir) Blurb...
Elliot (Alex Lawther) is a wispy dreamer who, with his mother Beatrice (Juliet Stevenson), is packing up their French country house in preparation to sell it. There is a melancholic air to their efforts, with forced companionableness from Beatrice who insists on dinners with her distant son. Alex takes breaks to wander into the local village bar, where he writes romantic poetry, wearing a vintage French army coat and eyeing up the rough beauty of local boy Clement, who works on his motorbike. Clement is as natural as Elliot is awkward and they strike up an unlikely friendship. Longing, loneliness, nostalgia for a sense of family that may have never existed permeate this delicate first feature from British debut director Andrew Stegall. It's a fine, elegantly crafted debut with Alex Lawther (X+Y, The Imitation Game) impressing as a major British star in the making.
Cast & Characters
Juliet Stevenson as Beatrice;
Alex Lawther as Elliot;
Phenix Brossard as Clement;
Finbar Lynch as Philip;
Niamh Cusack as Sally;
Patrice Juiff as Francois;
Guillaume Tobo as Butcher;
Mathilde Arsenault as Woman;
Danielle Catala as Woman at the Market;
Frederic Arsenault as Man