Submarine

Poor Oliver Tate! Witty, selfish, clueless, unappreciated Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) languishes in emotional oblivion as a social outsider, indulging the fantasies of his mind with the zest of an imagined genius. In sharp contrast to his delusions of cultural grandeur are the crass trappings of his easily-amused peers and the drab brickwork of Welsh village life. He's almost like the submarine of the title; submerged in mediocrity (though I don't believe this is what the title directly refers to) as he swims his way towards the promise of love with a girl named Jordana (Yasmin Paige). Unfortunately he's just a 16 year old boy, with all the cowardice and selfishness of the inexperienced when it comes to love. Meanwhile, his parents are drifting towards irreconcilable isolation from one another, and Oliver has it in mind to help his hapless dad before it's too late.

Richard Ayoade is perhaps best known for playing Moss on the cult British sitcom The I.T. Crowd, but he has also long had a career in directing music videos, and here he makes his feature film debut as director with an astounding clarity of purpose and style. He has a very well-read eye when it comes to film, allowing for a high degree of flow that encourgaes a lot of cinematic invention. The best examples of this are perhaps his vivid montages, which use super 8 footage and involve creative images such as a bed adrift on choppy waters. It's the sort of thing most directors would find too physically (and symbolically) difficult, but Ayoade's confidence has been honed by his great work as music video director for artists like Vampire Weekend and The Arctic Monkeys.

The coming-of-age/bildungsroman film has become some pretty well-trodden territory over the years, especially for young directors looking to make some artistic, semi-autobiographical statement. Much like Oliver himself, Ayoade manages to dance on the line between natural cleverness and sharp self-awareness, using an acute mix of irony and sincerity to get just the right tone. The use of Oliver as narrator is colourfully postmodern and lively, with the camera getting right inside his head for flights of fancy, extreme close ups, enlightening camera angles and so on. The casting of the brilliant Noah Taylor as Tate Sr. feels like a direct reference to Taylor's own work as a similar character to Oliver in two classic Australian films, and the relationship is used to comment on the inheritance of flawed behaviour in fathers and sons.

The themes explored aren't particularly new. For a teenage romance it takes in the expected dizzying heights and the soul-destroyingly awkward falls, but it's all in Ayoade's execution. There's also this idea of how well one person can truly know another (and this is what I took to be the submarine metaphor), and this is looked at through the distance that grows between Oliver's parents, and Jordana's resistance to romance and sentiment. I actually found Jordana to be a really interesting character, she starts out as this two-dimensional caricature - a collection of ideals that Oliver puts on a pedastal, but as he gets to know her better so too does the audience, and she shifts into a character just as complex and realistic as Oliver. Anyway, it's a very funny and inventive film, the sort of thing I could watch over and over again, and a modern indie classic steeped in decades of energetic art films.

HIGHLIGHTS: Some brief examples of this film's brilliance...

Oliver says, "I wish life was like the American soaps and when things got too melodramatic everything would just fade to black", and then it fades to black.

Also, Oliver seduces Jordana by writing the following on his hand and showing it to her: "Possible reasons to have sex. 1) You've fallen in love with me, 2. Best to do it before it's legal, 3. Bound to be disappointing so why wait?"

DIRECTOR: Richard Ayoade
WRITER/SOURCE: Richard Ayoade, based on a book by Joe Dunthorne.
KEY ACTORS: Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, Paddy Considine, Gemma Chan, Ben Stiller

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel Submarine by Joe Dunthorne.
- The film takes its cues from American indie films such as The Squid and the Whale, Thumbsucker, Rushmore, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Wackness.
- For a more subdued Australian perspective on similar themes, see Noah Taylor's two performances as Danny Embing in The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. Also the Australian coming-of-age film The Rage in Placid Lake.
- Going a lot further back, I think there's a touch of Breathless in Submarine as well.