Submarine

"Do you often feel like this?"

Richard Ayoade's perhaps not quite coming of age directorial debut is rich with schoolday humour, teenage awkwardness and familial drama.  Oliver Tate (a tremendous Craig Roberts) is a self-important, daydreaming 15 year old with concerns about the state of his parent's marriage and the potential for romance with wild-card Jordana (Yasmin Paige).  His school environment is depressingly familiar and his days are filled with paranoia, self-delusion, home-cinema daydreams and mild arson.

Ayoade has crafted a beautiful, witty and moving film littered with excellent technical touches (the use of super 8 footage, cinematography, lighting and editing are all outstanding) which make the film as much a visual treat as it is a comic one.  His script is laugh-out-loud funny and touching in equal measures, taking the perspective of the fascinating teenage protagonist and painting a picture of each of his relationships – with his father, his mother, Jordana, and his image of himself.  The relationship with his father is particularly moving – the apple clearly hasn’t fallen too far from the tree in some aspects of Oliver’s character and Noah Taylor gives a very sympathetic performance as a man judged harshly by his wife simply for being who he has always been.

Yasmin Paige is a beautiful actress with an ability to say so much with a sideways glance that it negates the need for language.  Her Jordana is intense and a little bit frightening but with enough depth to make her vulnerable moments genuinely moving.  Paddy Considine is clearly having a whale of a time as Graham, the mystic ex-boyfriend of Oliver’s mother, played by a rather too fresh faced Sally Hawkins.  Sally is a little too young for the role of the disillusioned mother and this combined with the costuming and hair makes her look a little like a young woman playing dress-up.

Craig Roberts puts in a remarkable turn as the self-important Oliver.  His dead-pan voice-over is hilarious and, like his young co-star, Yasmin, he can say so much with simply a look.  He fills the screen with a lonely, melancholic air, while his character battles against himself to be the person he wants to be.  It is a truly wonderful performance full of contradictions, sympathy and pathos.

Where Submarine really succeeds is in how well the picture presents its story through Oliver’s eyes.  Jordana is fascinating and beautiful because that is how he sees her, his father is noble but weak, his mother a harsh critic trying too hard to seem fair and kind and Graham an absolute tosser because that is how Oliver has cast them.  At many points he returns to the idea of his life being a film – super 8 home-movie memories, epic crane shots and cinematic endings – and these people around him are his own supporting cast.  It is wonderful to watch him floundering as reality comes crashing into his world in such a way that even he can’t cast himself as the hero.

A wonderful journey into the sometimes scary mind of an awkward teenager – 8/10