Star Rating:

Departure

Director: Andrew Steggall

Actors: Alex Lawther, Phenix Brossard

Release Date: Monday 30th November 2015

Genre(s): Drama

Running time: France minutes

The Imitation Game was very much the Benedict Cumberbatch Show but there was one other performance that caught the eye: Alex Lawther played the bullied younger Alan Turing in only a handful of short scenes but his potential was unmistakable. With Departure, a coming of age drama set over a summer in France, that potential comes to fruition.

Lawther plays something similar to Young Alan Turing here: his posh Elliot is a very intelligent teenager secretly in love with mechanic Clement (Brossard), seemingly the only other teen in a sleepy French village. Elliot and mother Beatrice (a solid Stevenson) are here to pack up the belongings of their summer retreat, which they plan to sell, and await for the impending arrival of dad and husband Philip (Lynch), apparently the source of some static at home. A budding writer/poet/playwright, Elliot wiles away the days walking through the surrounding forest and gazing longingly at the rough-and-ready Clement, who too suffers from problems with his folks…

Departure plays out like a First Love story Uncle Monty might have regaled over a glass of sherry: it’s hyper sensitive, it’s lovingly told, and it captures the never-love-this-deeply-and-purely-again innocence. A youth spent lying on the grass with a notebook close to hand and slipping down empty cobbled streets to plinky plonk piano soundtracks. Making his debut, Andrew Steggall resists the temptation to make the would-be love triangle that develops between mum, son and boy drive the narrative; as if that would be crass. Clement is seemingly oblivious to the affect he has on mother and son anyway, like the boy Dirk Bogarde reaches out to on the beach in Death In Venice (or, like the boy as he poses on the shoreline, maybe he's all too aware). In fact, Steggall doesn’t overly indulge any character other than Elliot, preferring to leave a lot unsaid.

However, while that can be Departure's strength it’s also its undoing. Despite setting things up nicely, story never really kicks off. When dad Philip does eventually turn up, and the family turmoil that was only hinted at before boils to the surface, the story doesn’t step up a gear as expected.

But all eyes will be on Lawther who captures that nervous, uncomfortable-in-your-own-skin gestures of a fifteen-year-old wonderfully, leaving a lot of the work to his eyes which hint at the pain and desire going on behind them. He elevates the character he's playing, who sounds more like a thirty-year-old frustrated writer than a teenager (would a teenager have read, let alone love, Proust? It’s a stretch).

Come for the easy-going vibe, stay for the star-making performance.