Submarine

[DB7]

Submarine review
Submarine feels like the most refreshing, urgent and original debut the British film industry has seen in years
By David Gritten

Dir: Richard Ayoade; starrring: Craig Roberts, Yasmine Paige, Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, Paddy Considine.

The temptation to overpraise our new movie talent can induce an almost superstitious pang of anxiety, but here goes anyway: Richard Ayoade’s Submarine feels like the most refreshing, urgent and original debut the British film industry has seen in years.

This coming-of-age story is set in Swansea and narrated by a teenage boy, but it thankfully gives a body-swerve to the tired clichés in which our industry routinely imprisons such subject matter. There’s no drab naturalism, sulky rebellion or political backdrop, and, best of all, no forced uplifting climax snatched from relentless adversity.

Instead writer-director Ayoade, in adapting Joe Dunthorne’s novel, has fashioned an adolescent fantasia that astutely employs its own film-making techniques to represent the thought processes of its unlikely young hero.

This is 15 year old Oliver (Craig Roberts), a clever, smallish, lugubrious schoolboy in a duffel coat, whose unchanging deadpan expression inescapably recalls Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate.

Oliver endures life by imagining alternate realities, but it’s clear from a witty passage at the outset that he’s not the most reliable of narrators: he foresees his death and its effect on his world – tearful classmates sobbing before television cameras, flower-bedecked school gates, candlelit vigils, and all of Wales in mourning. Oliver speculates on how all his predicaments might be portrayed on film, and how those films might end.

Two problems weigh heaviest on his mind – losing his virginity to his lovely but resolutely non-romantic classmate Jordana (Yasmine Paige), “whose only real flaw is her spontaneous bouts of eczema”, and saving his parents’ marriage. Dad (Noah Taylor) is a depressive marine biologist, reluctant to leave the house after losing his job as a hapless Open University lecturer.

His mother (the ubiquitous Sally Hawkins) seems a conventional twin-set type, but may harbour a passion for a smarmy, small-town new age guru (Paddy Considine, with a comically large mullet).

Ayoade, hitherto best-known from TV as Moss in The IT Crowd, tackles this material with the relish of a director let loose for the first time with a full set of film-making toys. He playfully uses an array of devices – jump-cuts, freeze-frames – and knowingly tips his hat to romantic clichés: fireworks, bikes and beaches (in this case, Swansea’s lovely Gower Coast.)

He and cinematographer Erik Wilson employ natural light for exterior scenes, immersing Submarine in a glow that, in the best way, feels utterly un-British.

Yet Ayoade loves language, too; delicious turns of phrase abound. Oliver snoops on the home front during “routine searches of my parents’ bedroom”. On first kissing Jordana, he recalls: “Her mouth tasted of milk, Polo mints and Dunhill International.”

Add to all this a calm treatment of darker themes, notably mortality and depression, and this is quite a debut. It’s not just that Submarine is delightful, assured work: Ayoade has shown a path to fledgling British film-makers, proving it’s possible to stick to one’s guns with personal, uncompromising films. It’ll be intriguing to monitor his next move: suddenly, out of nowhere, he’s the man to watch.

[Windyridge]

Thanks DB. Really looking forward to seeing this asap.

[Sgt Sunshine]

Its on at the local art centre next month........will def be there.....

[Heinrich]

Judging by the trailer, it looks like yet another boy-meets-girl story.

[Windyridge]

Talk about over-hyped. Another coming-of-age-boy-must-lose-virginity-we've-seen-it-all-before film. I didn't watch more than half of it....

[DB7]

Talk about over-hyped. Another coming-of-age-boy-must-lose-virginity-we've-seen-it-all-before film. I didn't watch more than half of it....

It doesn't really go anywhere but I did enjoy Yasmine Paige's turn as the pushy Jordana, and she shares a few sweet scenes with Oliver. The film suffers a bit from not having any particularly likeable characters.