Critics reviews

While the film abounds in characters bereft of the social graces necessary for easing their way through life, he's not in the business of ridiculing them.

While it's true that a lot of films are derivatives . . . , their reduction to elements of other films can miss the fact that, sometimes, they're trying to create something altogether new from some old recipes. Such is the case of SUBMARINE, of which you can safely say something like: it's GODARD + RUSHMORE + THE 400 BLOWS + HAROLD AND MAUDE + NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, and actually summarize the whole thing rather neatly.

"Submarine" isn't an insipid teen sex comedy... It's a self-confident work for the first-time director, Richard Ayoade, whose purpose I think is to capture that delicate moment in some adolescent lives when idealism and trust lead to tentative experiments.

Submarine isn’t a perfect film, but it’s a terrific first one. Leaving the theater, you feel you’ve been taken in hand by a director of tremendous promise, and you can’t wait to see what he does next.

This is the kind of story, as Oliver himself would admit, that we have already seen dozens of times. But Mr. Ayoade’s keen visual wit and clever, knowing touches keep it surprising and nimble, especially in the quick, lurching early scenes, which are startlingly funny.

Submarine‘s forcefully unwhimsical sense of fantasy ultimately serves to make the humdrum homeliness of Oliver’s world, with its crumbling industrial plants and sad little cottage homes, feel all the more insistently real.

Prominent British TV comedy writer-performer Richard Ayoade (star of the mediocre IT Crowd) makes his feature-film debut with a flatlined attempt at Wes Anderson– esque romantic melancholy and precocious idiosyncrasy—complete with Truffaut references.

Submarine is so poised, so studded with good things... that it may be churlish to pick holes in it. But it’s exactly because Ayoade is such an obvious cinephile, and is so talented, that it’s important to insist that filmmaking this self-consciously stylised and citational will always lack the emotional impact that its director secretly and belatedly craves.

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.

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.

The storytelling style which Ayoade lunges for with uncynical reverence and a cinephile’s passion... is a holy trinity of the French new wave, mannered American indies of the late ’90s and superior British domestic comedy. It’s a winning combination which sees sparks of imagination flying from most scenes.

While it owes a debt to Wes Anderson and the like, Ayoade’s film is entirely his own, from the elegant opening titles to the pitch-perfect closing scene.