Written and Directed by Richard Ayoade.
Starring Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Paddy Considine, Noah Taylor and Gemma Chan.
SYNOPSIS:
Submarine details the teenage years of Oliver Tate as he processes the confusion of his parents’ dithering marriage and his own longing heart.
Richard Ayoade directed the music video for Vampire Weekend’s ‘Oxford Comma’. It’s filmed in one hugely complex and intricate take, but looks inventively effortless. Wes Anderson-by-numbers, really. Nevertheless, it’s a very good piece of filmmaking. Ayoade is arguably more famous in front of the camera, as the I.T. Crowd’s Moss, or Darkplace’s Dean Leaner, but he’s trying. He now has a feature under his belt - Submarine.
The film follows Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an impossible dreamer, through adolescence. He’s read too much Nietzsche and seen too many Truffauts. It puts him at odds with his majestically crude school friends. Oliver tells us all this through his own neurotic narration. He falls for a girl at school, Jordana Bevan. Because she’s a bit of an outcast, like him, he reckons he has more of a chance. When he says ‘outcast’, you know he actually means, and believes, ‘misunderstood’. Teenagers, eh?
Aside from these complications of the heart, and general coping with existence, Oliver’s parents’ relationship is becoming increasingly strained. His father, Lloyd (Noah Taylor), is a marine biologist who’s susceptible to bouts of depression. He once drank hot lemon from the same cup for four days without changing or washing it - a smart detail, signalling for whenever he starts his spiral down. We notice Lloyd holding the hot lemon cup, sure, and so does Oliver (there isn’t much he doesn’t notice). But his mother, Jill (Sally Hawkins), carries on her flirtations with their new next-door neighbour; her old flame, Graham (Paddy Constantine). Hopefully she’s too blinded by the attention, rather than being beyond caring for her dull, dispirited husband.
Later on in the film, it emerges that Jordana’s mother is very ill. She asks Oliver to visit her in hospital the following Friday at 6pm. As he is about to leave,he sees Lloyd sipping from that unwashed hot lemon cup. Does he stay with his depressed father, or visit his girlfriend’s dying mother? The latter is surely more pressing, and he’d promised Jordana so sincerely. Was he going to leave the house anyway? Such choices are beyond the pay-grade of a 15 year-old.
The film is cut with that particularly European brand of melodramatic flair. This is not just for style’s sake. We are watching the film through Oliver’s perspective. He sees his life as some French New Wave masterpiece, one yet to be unearthed by film scholars. It rings true for anyone who has ever been a teenager. We’re all tortured, undiscovered geniuses at that age.
We can all relate. Much of Submarine’s humour comes from this self-absorbed, exaggerated perception of Oliver’s life. It’s funny because we’ve been there. Who hasn’t thought, during an especially significant moment in one’s life, how good said significant moment would look from a crane shot slowly tracking out? However, as Oliver pessimistically notes, his life story would probably only have the budget for a simple track-back. Ayoade’s camera then simply tracks back to end the scene. Even the very mechanics of filmmaking mock Oliver’s teenage self-absorption.
If you watch Submarine with a complacent eye, you’ll liken it to the American ‘indie’ films. Wes Anderson’s name is now never far away when considering anything with contemporary quirk. But that ‘indie’ scene feels stagnant these days. ‘Indie’ is now a style rather than a means of production. At its best, the American ‘indie’ output can be very enjoyable. At worst, though, it can be insufferably smug.
What Submarine accomplishes, and very well, is a joining between the best parts of the American ‘indie’ films – comical neuroticism, benign quirkiness and a deep emotional attachment – to the stylistics of the continent. After all, between the two is where we sit politically. Why not try it out in British film?
Oli Davis
365 Days, 100 Films
Movie Review Archive
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