http://cinesthesiac.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/that-sinking-feeling-submarine.html
"None of this will matter when I'm 38," our hero tells himself - yet the audience, who may well be some distance ahead of him, will surely be aware that, in love, you often encounter the same damn problems over and over again, no matter your age, however smart you think you are.
Younger viewers may be reminded of Wes Anderson, and - given the middle-school setting - Rushmore in particular. Characters are defined by wardrobe choices: the youngsters by those insulating coats, the elders by what we might call Signifying Hair. If Hawkins is rather trapped by her period 'do - there's little room under that harsh Selina Scott fringe for the actress to demonstrate her usual charm - then Taylor's beard is precisely that one might have witnessed on an Open University presenter circa 1981, and Considine makes his Limahl-like fin mullet an integral part of Graham's bellendedness. There's an element of Anderson's self-conscious dress-up to all this - these are teenagers who act and speak as though they know they're in a book, or a movie (sample extract from Oliver's narration: "Her tongue was stained blue with blackcurrent squash; it smouldered in the cold") - yet here it all somehow funnels back into a sort-of true picture of the adolescent experience.This, coupled with the protagonists' acute sense of being off-the-radar, may be whereSubmarine gets its title from, though there's water, water everywhere in Ayoade's film. From the stagnant duckpond in which hapless bullying victims are submerged to the gaudy fish tank prominently positioned in the Taits' kitchen, these characters are never too far away from that sinking feeling - the coats almost become lifejackets, constants to cling to - and desperately trying to raise their heads above an ever-mounting tide. It's apt the film should conclude with Oliver and Jordana staring at the sea, to paraphrase that old Cure album beloved of adolescent mopes: a moment of rare calm, leaving us wondering where the next wave - of hormones, of crises - will carry them.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/17/submarine-reviewSubmarine
Production year: 2010
Country: UK
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 96 mins
Directors: Richard Ayoade
Cast: Craig Roberts, Noah Taylor, Paddy Considine, Sally Hawkins, Yasmin Paige
More on this filmRichard Ayoade probably first came to public attention by appearing in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, a spoof horror television series by Matthew Holness about a psychogeographically troubled Romford hospital built over the gates of hell. Since then, he has written, directed and acted in TV shows including The Mighty Boosh, Nathan Barley and The IT Crowd, and also directed an Arctic Monkeys video. But nothing in his CV prepared me for the confidence and panache of the debut movie feature now being sprung on us. It's a dark coming-of-age comedy about a lovelorn teenage boy in 1980s Swansea, written and directed by Ayoade, adapted from a novel by Joe Dunthorne, and executive produced by Ben Stiller, who appears in a subliminal cameo. Ayoade's film has absorbed the influences of Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry in its deadpan ironies and block capital sans-serif titles, but it's still really personal and confident. For sheer technique, Ayoade can hardly be faulted, though introducing characters in freezeframe/voiceover is getting to be a cliche. His film is shaped with flair, coolly allowing us to enjoy its unrealities and to savour the suspicion that a thirtysomething's sophistication and cinephilia have been sneakily backdated into a teenager's life to offset his emotional vulnerability: a protective nostalgia. I never found Submarine moving exactly, despite the heavily signposted sadness and loneliness of every single major character; it runs essentially in a comedy groove and is a knight's move away from any emotional reality. For me, this somehow dissolves any potential lump in the throat. But it is touching, sweet and, most importantly, very funny. Watching it, I got exactly the same exhilarated feeling as with Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead: someone very talented at comedy had been allowed to take the helm of a British feature film and do precisely what he wanted to. The star is Craig Roberts, playing Oliver Tate, a duffelcoat-wearing loner at school who doesn't hesitate to join in the bullying of an overweight girl whom he had secretly got off with at last term's wild-west-themed disco. This he does in order to impress Jordana, played by Yasmin Paige, who wears a faintly disturbing red coat (Ayoade may or may not have in mind Don't Look Now). She has a bullying streak and mild pyromania issues – in moments of intimacy, she likes to singe a boy's leg hairs with a lighted match. They get together, and the resulting placidity and comfort settles them both. But there are complications. Oliver's parents Lloyd (Noah Taylor) and Jill (Sally Hawkins) are experiencing a marital crisis triggered by the appearance of Jill's old flame Graham (Paddy Considine), a dynamic new age self-help guru who runs seminars and sells motivational videos about one's colour-aura. Jordana's mother Jude (Melanie Walters) is also seriously ill. The glorious note of self-pity is sounded at the very first with Oliver's fantasy of what would happen if he committed suicide – an orgy of candle-lit vigils and sobbing teenage girls confiding their adoration for Oliver to local news teams. Throughout, Oliver maintains the stunned expression of someone who has been slapped in the face with a fish, and rarely smiles. As his dad, Taylor looks agonised, face deeply incised with wrinkles and far older than his years. Sally Hawkins plays a repressed woman with weird Thunderbird-puppet mannerisms. Everything about her life is difficult, including a workplace where the tradition is that you have to bring in your own cake on your birthday, an exquisitely uncomfortable touch. Considine's spiritual ninja Graham unlocks long-forgotten passions within Jill. She crisply informs her traumatised son later: "I gave Graham a handjob in the back of his van." When the illness of Jordana's mother becomes grave, Oliver reads a child-psychology book about the importance of pets and how their death introduces children to the grieving process – so he makes an appallingly misjudged attempt to poison Jordana's dog in order to soften the blow of her mother's imminent demise. Like his mum's handjob confession, this is not credible, strictly speaking, but it is funny. Yet having succumbed almost to a breakdown over the Christmas lunch, Jordana's dad Brynn (Sion Tudor Owen) tearfully, brusquely demands that Owen think of himself as a member of their family. That is one moment that is genuinely moving. For some, this movie will have a Marmitey taste: it will divide opinion. Arguably, it's a bit too cool for school sometimes, and it is self-conscious. But these are byproducts of its undoubted confidence at carrying off a visually distinctive, witty, autobiographical comedy. As for Ayoade, there's clearly a big future payday for him in Hollywood, if he wants it, but I can't help hoping he develops in depth and scope here, as a tremendous new voice in British film.
Submarine plumbs the depths of self-satisfaction
Nostalgic coming-of-age films feed our need to delude ourselves about the way we were http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/mar/21/submarine-richard-ayoade-teenage?intcmp=239 For his first feature, the NME-dubbed "coolest man in London" gives us an already acclaimed portrayal of adolescence in south Wales. You might reasonably have expected something funny, touching and perceptive, and at least according to its fans, Submarine is all of these things. You might also have hoped for a bit of insight into life on the threshold of adulthood in today's fretful Britain. Yet mobiles and iPods are mysteriously absent. In their place, we get record-players, tape-decks, typewriters and duffle-coats. Director Richard Ayoade says of his film, "The idea was that it shouldn't be set in a particular time-frame." Still, Crocodile Dundee is on at the flicks, and that had its UK release in December 1986, which fits pretty much with the Thatcher-age props. This commandeering of the immediately pre-internet era reflects a strange penchant of the coming-of-age genre. Much of the time it seems to shun the present, and hark back to the fairly recent past. Lately we've had An Education, and before that Billy Elliot and This Is England, but it's not just us. The likes of American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, The Last Picture Show, My Girl and Stand by Me are all set in days of yore, but not very yore. So for that matter are A Nous les Petites Anglaises, Diabolo Menthe and the granddaddy of them all, Les Quatre Cents Coups. Audiences seem happy enough with this approach, but it points to an obvious conclusion. It's not adolescence itself that attracts either film-makers or the rest of us; it's the urge to taste once more the madeleines of our very own temps perdu. In 1986, Ayoade, who's now 33, would himself have been approaching puberty. The book on which his film is based was set in 1997; in that year its author, Joe Dunthorne, and his hero Oliver were both aged 15 and living in Swansea. There seems a bit more to all this than straightforward nostalgia. Adolescence is the most intense of life-stages. Amidst its swirling emotions, raging hormones and many-fronted conflicts, we shape the identity that will stay with us into adulthood. Few of us emerge from this ordeal with our self-regard unscathed. Perhaps, though, we want to believe we did. It's to this need that cinema seems to be addressing itself. Submarine shows us how. Many of today's adolescents may seem gauche, mulish and angry. Yet back in the 80s, if Oliver and his girlfriend Jordana are anything to go by, they were quite unspeakably cute. Real teens often lose the capacity to communicate; Oliver turns his own life into a screenplay. Nowadays, skin trouble sometimes seems enough to destroy young lives; Jordana wears her barely perceptible eczema like a fashion accessory. The cosseted youth of today may be tiresomely self-obsessed; we, however, didn't lock ourselves in our rooms with headphones clamped to our ears: we applied ourselves instead to saving our parents' marriages. For we were cooler, bolder and tougher than our puny contemporary counterparts. For us, bullying was more than a nasty remark on Facebook. We'd find a fat girl and push her into a pond, just to impress our sweetheart. Hang on, though; doesn't that make us sound just a tiny bit horrible? Not to worry. Ayoade knows how to make an escapade like this look as winsome as could be. He describes Oliver as "mean and distant and selfish". Maybe we know deep down that at his age we too possessed such qualities. How reassuring to learn that in our young day they would have apparently made us lovable. Other films about adolescence have provided much the same kind of comfort as Submarine, yet the coming-of-age story started out as more than a means of flattering those who are safely beyond the torments of their youth. It has its roots in the Bildungsroman, perhaps Germany's most significant contribution to the flowering of the novel. The term was coined by a critic called Karl Morgenstern in the 1820s. He said that the genre had two purposes. It should portray "the hero's Bildung (formation) as it begins and proceeds to a certain level of perfection". Yet it should also foster "the Bildung of the reader to a greater extent than any other type of novel." Oh well. The big screen has its own furrow to hoe.