Departure **** (2015, Juliet Stevenson, Alex Lawther, Phénix Brossard, Finbar Lynch, Niamh Cusack) – Movie Review

Juliet Stevenson and Alex Lawther give the most brilliant, quite heart-breaking performances as a very English, middle-class mother and teenage son packing up for good their idyllic long-term holiday home in the South of France.

As they start clearing out the house, the literary-inclined Elliot sees a tough-looking French boy (Phénix Brossard) he likes the look of. Elliot presses on with trying to improve his schoolboy French and writes in his notebook and likes poetry, Proust Rimbeau and Victor Hugo. ‘You’re such a cliché,’ the boy tells him. ‘Je t’aime,’ he tells the French boy. ‘Your French is terrible,’ the French boy says.

He’s a bit of a tantalising enigma, but he seems nice enough. The two boys have at least one thing in common – mother problems. Elliot says his mother is limited, Clément tells him his mother is in a care home with cancer.

Mother, Beatrice, catches on quite quickly and is none too happy, for reasons we will discover later on. With her marriage to Philip (Finbar Lynch) crumbling, she tries to leave France without telling her neighbour (Niamh Cusack), who calls round to call her on it. ‘I’ve never been very good at friends,’ Beatrice says. Writer-director Andrew Steggall has been watching Pinter plays, possibly.

What’s basically a boy meets boy story is wrapped up in all sorts of beguiling arty artifices in this hauntingly bitter-sweet, amusing, perceptive and ultimately very affecting movie. The appealing performances are detailed, twitchy and minimalist, heightened naturalism with a dash of poetic licence, like the film itself.

I never knew there were underwater film studios in the UK, but I’m glad there are, because Steggall makes very good use of them. There’s a lot of stuff about water in the movie. I’m not going to make any attempt at interpreting it (cleansing?, rebirth?), but I’m guessing that Steggall is a Piscean.

The title is written in both languages, as Départ turns into Departure on screen at the start of the movie.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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