Submarine

Submarine is a mesmerising, cineliterate debut from Richard Ayoade, one of our most original comedy actors and a music video director of some repute. Based on Joe Dunthorne’s 2008 novel and set in the 1980’s, it tells the tale of Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an earnest Welsh schoolboy in the gauche, solipsistic, pseudo-intellectual tradition of Adrian Mole, Holden Caulfield and Rushmore’s Max Fischer. Oliver has two primary concerns: to sleep with girl-of-his-dreams Jordana (Yasmin Paige) and to save his parents’ marriage. This is typical coming-of-age territory, but Ayoade invests it with peppery dialogue, smart characterisation, genuine visual artistry and a lovely, Richard Hawley-tinted soundtrack from Alex Turner.

Submarine is positively awash with cinematic references (the red coat of Don’t Look Now; the adolescence-by-the-sea imagery of Les Quatre Cents Coups; Godardian chapter headings and stirring strings; the Interiors-esque tableau when the Tate family watch Mum’s ex-boyfriend Graham from the window) and, judging by his recent interview with Sight and Sound, Ayoade is something of a film buff; the film is shot, narrated and stylised like a seventies French film, and Oliver even sleeps under a painting of a still from Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud. But the film wears its intellectualism rather more lightly than Oliver himself: on a Woody Allen-esque date to see Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Jordana dismisses Oliver’s cultural funpack of King Lear, The Catcher in the Rye and Nietzsche and walks out of the film halfway through, just as his mother (Sally Hawkins) wants to see Crocodile Dundee to the disappointment of his Rohmer-loving father (Noah Taylor).

These little details are fun winks for a sad anorak like me, but (far more importantly) this is a highly original, deeply satisfying work in its own right. Our American friends churn out these sorts of offbeat adolescent tragicomedies like there’s no tomorrow (The Squid and the Whale; Adventureland; the overrated 500 Days of Summer), but Submarine has more bite, more invention and a subtler sense of melancholy than all of them: if this film were French and made in the seventies, it would be worshipped in bedrooms like mine and Oliver’s all over the country. It is full of symbols and expressionistic quirks, but it never feels gimmicky. I particularly liked the use of fire and water imagery. Fire is exciting, dangerous and ephemeral (Graham’s light show; the firework display; the ‘light arson’ Oliver commits with Jordana; Oliver’s fire riddle) whilst water is associated with depression and routine (the bullied Zoe falling into the pond; the father’s depression as an extension of his work as a marine biologist; the fish tank during awkward family meals; Oliver’s solitary trips to the beach; Oliver’s nightmare on the bridge). Those who know their Truffaut will be able to guess which of the two elements provides the backdrop to the film’s denouement.

The acting is strong and off-kilter, with Noah Taylor’s gentle Antipodean dad and Paddy Considine’s New Age mystic rocker Graham a delightfully sketched yin and yang of fading middle-aged masculinity. I remember reading an article in Empire Magazine a while ago that said Paddy Considine could be the next Robert de Niro. That may sound ridiculous, but not many actors can do terrifying and sweet as seamlessly as Considine and I think he could turn out to be one of our great character actors (he’d be brilliant in a Paul Thomas Anderson ensemble piece); he also has impeccable comic timing (please watch the criminally underappreciated Shane Meadows mockumentary Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee as soon as possible if you have not already). Craig Robert’s studied, ever-startled Oliver is sweet and more endearing than most of cinema’s precocious oddballs (Bud Cort in Harold and Maude, for instance), but I found Yasmin Paige’s Jordana very annoying: I’m sure this is the point and of course one should sympathise as her mum isn’t well, but part of me thought Oliver would be better off with Zoe.

But what an exciting director Richard Ayoade looks to be, a genuine auteur with shades of Wes Anderson, Woody Allen and François Truffaut, translated into his own distinctive cinematic vocabulary. Submarine is a poetic, self-effacing, very funny exploration of growing up, a dazzling first feature and the finest film about adolescence since Rushmore. Ayoade could fizzle out, of course, but (like his Warp Films stablemate Chris Morris) I have a feeling that he is only going to get better as he matures: if Submarine is his Bottle Rocket, I cannot wait to see his Royal Tenenbaums.