Submarine movie review (2011) | Little White Lies

Sub­ma­rine

17 Mar 2011 / Released: 18 Mar 2011

Words by Tom Seymour

Directed by Richard Ayoade

Starring Craig Roberts, Sally Hawkins, and Yasmin Paige

A young man wearing a black coat and tie stands in an outdoor setting with a serious expression.
A young man wearing a black coat and tie stands in an outdoor setting with a serious expression.
4

Anticipation.

Few debut films have attracted such an insistent buzz.

4

Enjoyment.

A shy, bright, wonderfully appealing film.

4

In Retrospect.

How bittersweet for the UKFC that this heads a pack of strong and diverse British films in 2011.

British cin­e­ma isn’t good at being cool, but Sub­ma­rine has bucked that trend; defi­ant­ly so.

Sub­ma­rine is a com­ing-of-age dra­ma set in down-at-heel Swansea in what looks like the 1980s. The hero of the film is Oliv­er Tate (Craig Roberts), a lone­ly teenag­er who wears a duf­fel coat and some­times pre­tends to have Cotard’s syn­drome: a type of autism, his dic­tio­nary tells him, that con­vinces peo­ple they are dead. His par­ents are bare­ly talk­ing and on the edge of divorce. His girl­friend Jor­dana (Yas­min Paige), a dumpy girl with a Lego hair­cut and a Don’t Look Now coat, is sad; her moth­er has life-threat­en­ing cancer.

Feel free to roll your eyes at anoth­er grit­ty British ode to how tough it is in a sink estate some­where out­side Lon­don. But Sub­ma­rine is direct­ed by The IT Crowd’s Richard Ayoade, adapt­ed from a nov­el by Joe Dun­thorne, pro­duced by Warp Films, exec-pro­duced by Ben Stiller and scored by Arc­tic Mon­key Alex Turn­er. It was the tick­et at last year’s Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val. Soon after, the rights were sold to the Wein­stein broth­ers for a mil­lion dol­lars. British cin­e­ma isn’t good at being cool. Sub­ma­rine has bucked that trend; defi­ant­ly so.

While Oliver’s dad (Noah Tay­lor) plum­mets into depres­sion and his mum (a love­ly Sal­ly Hawkins) con­sid­ers an elic­it affair with a mul­let- topped men­tal well-being guru (Pad­dy Con­si­dine), Oliv­er fix­ates on los­ing his and tak­ing Jordana’s vir­gin­i­ty. He antic­i­pates the event by wear­ing one of his dad’s old suits and, to Jordana’s hor­ror, cov­er­ing his bed in rose petals. After he talks her round, she leaves him with a sin­gle piece of advice: Don’t get cocky.” It sums up the film – wit­ty, gen­tle, self-dep­re­cat­ing, unsen­ti­men­tal and strung togeth­er with a panache whol­ly unwor­thy of a debutant.

Like Jon Bön Jovi dream­ing of the movies they won’t make of him when he’s dead, Ayoade has made a virtue of self-consciousness.While this film is about a self-absorbed, over-ana­lyt­i­cal teenag­er, Ayoade has mim­ic­ked Scorsese’s rela­tion­ship with Travis Bick­le – we seem to observe Oliv­er Tate direct­ing his own movie. Oliv­er, reject­ed and depressed, wish­es for a slow-dis­solve to dark­ness before a cut to a lat­er, hap­pi­er scene. And so we wit­ness it.

From the gen­tle irrev­er­ence of The Grad­u­ate to the high-end angst of Rebel With­out a Cause, the hor­mone-pit of a teenager’s mind has always worked on screen. Michael Cera grasped the mar­ketabil­i­ty of kook­i­fy­ing heart­break, and in the process became the most icon­ic Cana­di­an export since Ter­rance and Phillip.

Ayoade is a con­fessed Ceraphile and this film could, in the blink of an eye, so eas­i­ly have suc­cumbed to Youth in Revolt cutesy or Juno quirk.

Occa­sion­al­ly, very occa­sion­al­ly, Ayoade allows it to – with an over­ly long voiceover or bag­gy duo­logue. But he has craft­ed a movie so naked­ly in love with the diver­si­ties and absur­di­ties of cin­e­ma, and so aller­gic to the mod­ernist pre­tence, polit­i­cal sub­text and forced res­o­lu­tions of our indie indus­try, that Sub­ma­rine nev­er feels trapped in the whims of the here and now.

Indeed, with the minute­ly craft­ed Super 8 videos of Oliv­er and Jor­dana cavort­ing on the beach­es, with the fire­work par­ties, with Alex Turner’s croon­ing melodies, Sub­ma­rine makes you crave for a romance you only ever imagined.

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