Review: SUBMARINE - Literate, Heartfelt and Funny.
rating: 5
The comic actor Richard Ayoade has gifted audiences a magnificent debut with this adolescent fable. Its charming and idiosyncratic, managing to be sweet without being sentimental, profound without being whimsical. Perhaps best of all its exploration of a teens underground existence is devoid of cliché. Directed with great confidence and a good eye for character-based quirkiness, of the kind so successfully personified by Ayoade himself, the key to Submarines success is building the world of the film around Craig Roberts awkward protagonist. It plays like an extension of his character, a character that knows hes occupying his own story. The structure is lifted from the source novel and the film is self aware like a story written in the first person. Each intertitle Prologue, Part One, etc, is accompanied by a dramatic musical cue reflecting the importance Oliver attaches to each set of events. Doesnt every introspective teen imagine their lives this way? Occasionally Olivers imagination intrudes on the shape of the movie; he imagines that one scene in his biopic would only have the budget for a zoom out and thats what we get, he thinks of his new relationship with Yasmin Paiges moody and magnificent Jordana as a super 8 film and were watching it. This might read as self-indulgent or postmodern but its nothing so trite. Submarine is a closed world like the best stories, a complete movie in every sense. The submarine is the perfect metaphor for the invisible loner and stealth existence that many teenagers imagine theyre experiencing under the noses of aloof kith and kin. The movie runs with it with enough maritime motifs and allusions to stock a Hemingway short story. Oliver's a sublime creation; literate, curious, detached; the kind of kid that has a favourite industrial area and sees his parents and peers as subjects to be studied. Never quite sure where to look, duffle coated and brief cased, hes passing through a deep, hidden world of strange beauty, colourful oddities and darkness.
He negotiates a series of depth charges; losing his virginity, his mothers suspected affair with a new age old flame, scavenging for self-understanding; emerging shaken but in tact. Everyones adolescence is charted along the same perilous course, if only we had the wit to see it. Heres a film that does and although it has a few unnatural advantages in that respect, not least the hindsight of both its director and original novelist Joe Dunthorne, theres the illusion of spontaneity and freshness in these observations. Its a film that never fails to connect with its audience. Its not ostensibly a period piece but Submarine plays like a childhood remembered rather than a contemporary account. Ayoade may have wanted to root the film in his own youth, by way of relating to Oliver, hence the signature elements of contemporary teendom the web, the smart phone, the slang, are all mercifully absent. Submarine is a film that loves language and doesnt feel compelled to butcher it for the sake of offering up a kind of fools realism. 
Oliver Tates world is one of typewriters, videotape and cassettes; characters whose style is conspicuously aged. Olivers father was, in recent memory, an archetypal Open University TV presenter, suggesting the film is set in the Eighties but it remains undefined. The effect for someone like me, whos the same age as Ayoade, is a very personal kind of nostalgia that isnt affixed to times and dates. Similarly theres a yesteryear aesthetic to Alex Turners songs, inspired by Scott Walkers album of Jacques Brel material. The cumulative effect is to give the film the character of something like an aged whisky; its perfect now but seems sourced from another time. Its a wonderfully mature piece of work. In both its style and preoccupations, cineastes will appreciate Ayoades invocations of Eric Rohmer, whos mentioned, and Jean-Jacques Beineix, as well as the fact that hes managed to make a film that equals their best work. In addition to the directors French fancies, theres also a hint of Woody Allens neurotic wit in Olivers words, so perhaps its unsurprising that Allens face adorns the boys bedroom wall. Its hard to tell but Id have marked it down as an approving look. Literate, heartfelt and funny, Submarine is a mesmerising film brought to life by sterling work on both sides of the camera. Make time for it. 
Submarine is released in the U.K. tomorrow.