Submarine DVD Review

Submarine (2010)

Submarine, they enable to destroy, heat, change and transform as well as conduct research about properties of materials and relations between them. Ultrasounds allow to obtain precise images of objects thanks to the short wave length. 15-year-old Olivier Tate (Brilliant Craig Roberts: Jane Eyre,The First Time) the protagonist of ’Submarine’, wants to know how the things around him are really like. However, neither nature, nor technology offered him a sonar. It does not discourage him from suspecting that the true life goes on deep inside. Only faint reflections of phenomena are visible on the surface. Olivier desperately dives without oxygen mask. He swims until he becomes breathless.

Richard Ayoade(The IT Crowd,Bunny and The Bull) tells a typical initiation story. He observes a teenager who watches his parents, awkwardly enters into relations with women, makes his first, very foreseeable mistakes and matures to the ability to see himself from a distance. The literary model for the main character filtered his experiences through stories drawn from voracious reading. Director of the film found a marvelous equivalent for words. He resorted to images. Francis Scott Fitzgerald described his characters drawing on film terminology. He indicated the possible ways in which we could perceive them. Olivier applies the same gimmicks to himself. He tells us when the camera operator should zoom out, move from close up to a full scene, place entire character in the centre of the frame. But who is hidden on the other side of the lens? The answer to this question is not as important as the statement that he or she is watching everything from a distance. Olivier,from a perspective of the past moments, the director from a distance of the past years.

Everything is mediated, filtered, familiar and domesticated. What then is so unique about this film? It seems that it is the extraordinary freshness and narrative unpretentiousness which is harder to find in today’s cinema than a needle in a haystack. Mike Mills has almost mastered it in ‘Beginners’ (2011) which enjoyed great success in the cinema during summer. If we went back in time, we would find it only at the end of the 1950s, the beginning of the 1960s.  The reference to the most prominent French New Wave film ‘Breathless’ (1960) by Jean-Luc Godard in the first chapter is not a coincidence. Richard Ayoade’s film is formally too sophisticated to compare it on the technical level. The shared secret of the Frenchmen and the aspiring director is rather found in the lightness of dialogues, youthful rebelliousness against what and how everything should be. To describe the Submarine’s narration I could quote Tadeusz Lubelski who, writing about ‘La Pointe Courte’ (1954) by Agnes Vardy, depicted a style that is ‘slow, thoughtful, as women sensitive to the intangible and treating seriously relations of a man with the surrounding world’.

It is also worth mentioning that in one of the scenes, Olivier is running on the beach as if Antoine from ‘The 400 Blows’ (1959) by François Truffaut. He is running away, it is certain. However, undoubtedly, he is running away from something else than young Jean-Pierre Léaud years ago. Olivier often meets with Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige: Ballet Shoes,I Could Never be Your Woman) at the seaside, a girl that doesn’t like anything that is even the slightest bit romantic, who has pyromaniac inclinations and a red coat.She is fascinating. Yasmin Paige’s face, her surface indifference and hostility create an unsettling experience when Jordana appears in any scene. Nonetheless, she certainly excites Olivier. The boy also pays a lot of attention to his parent’s marriage ups and downs. We also meet Purvis (Paddy Considine; Cinderella Man,In America) in one of the scenes thanks to alleged romance with Olivier’s mother Jill (Sally Hawkins: Never Let Me Go,Happy-Go-Lucky). He runs into the Tate’s life with his pickup truck and invites to the self-education program based on strategies typical for New Age ideology.

Thanks to it, Olivier could discover the road to youthful rebelliousness but it seems that he coped with it on his own a long time ago. Richard Ayoade also allows himself to defy the normality, yet at the same time he tells completely ordinary story. He adds a bit of humor and a pinch of tragedy to this coming-of-age film drama. He spices up the faint joy of first love with the bitter taste of disappointment. The result of this blend is not indigestible. It is magical in a way which made me dream for a long while to be 15 again. Is it nostalgy for the past? No, it is rather the effect of the ethereal tale of Richard Ayoade who created his own world from the film realities of the old masters and he sewed me into it.

Written by Maggie Gogler

(A nice designers cut of the Submarine film poster by Allcity Media)