In her 1998 essay What’s a Good Gay Film?, film critic B. Ruby Rich considered what queer audiences were looking for.

She wrote that queer cinema-goers were seeking “films of validation and a culture of affirmation: work that can reinforce identity, visualise respectability, combat injustice and bolster social status”. They were tired, she argued, of stereotypes of queer suffering and trauma. Instead, they required “nothing downbeat or too revelatory; and happy endings, of course”.

But if a straightforward happy ending is what you are after, Departures is not the film for you. This miraculously self-financed and stylish debut feature is not purely affirmative. At times, the screen shimmers with sadness. And yet, wryly and playfully, the film also resists becoming gloomy. Tonally sophisticated, it combines the bleak with the whimsical, ultimately sidestepping the crude dichotomy of happy or unhappy endings altogether.

The film opens with a love-scarred Benji (played by the film’s writer and co-director Lloyd Eyre-Morgan) recalling a recent relationship. In flashback, he remembers meeting handsome Jake (David Tag) in the airport as they both wait for a flight to Amsterdam. Jake bewilders Benji: his flirtation is suggestive but always deniable, never quite declaring itself. Charismatic and assertive, Jake engineers it so that they sit together on the flight, telling the air steward that he is Benji’s carer – a description which quickly becomes grimly ironic.

Later, Jake rejects the suggestion that he is gay but demands that Benji give him a blowjob regardless. Monthly trips to Amsterdam follow and the two men develop a........

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