Submarine

A crowd favourite at the 2010 Toronto Inter-‐ national Film Festival®, Submarine is an absolute delight. Full of surprises and amazingly affecting, this is a film to fall in love with. Writer-‐director Richard Ayoade is already a rising star in the United Kingdom, and the film’s wry comedy and dead-‐on observations has found a new canvas for the view of flawed youth.

Fifteen-‐year-‐old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts, Jane Eyre) has two big ambitions: to save his parents’ marriage via carefully plotted intervention and to lose his virginity before his next birthday. Worried that his mom (the always delightful Sally Hawkins, Made in Dagenham, Jane Eyre) is having an affair with New Age weirdo Graham (a hilarious Paddy Considine, Hot Fuzz, The Bourne Ultimatum), Oliver monitors his parents’ sex life by charting the dimmer switch in their bedroom. He also forges suggestive love letters from Mom to Dad. His love interest Jordana (a spirited performance by newcomer Yasmin Paige) is refreshingly complicated; a self-‐professed pyromaniac, she supervises Oliver’s journal writing – especially the bits about her. When necessary, she orders him to cross things out.

Based on Joe Dunthorne’s acclaimed novel, Submarine is a captivating coming-‐of-‐age story with an offbeat edge. Oliver is a consummate anti-‐hero, as sardonic and self-‐obsessed as any postmodern Holden Caulfield, and Roberts plays the role with the necessary cocktail of stubborn egotism and gangly unease. Ayoade is clearly a devotee of Godard, employing snippets of music and riffing on his use of colour coding. But even with the shades of Godard and Wes Anderson, this vibrant film comes off as a real original and marks the beginning of a career to watch closely.

Cast: Craig Roberts, Sally Hawkins, Yasmin Paige, Paddy Considine, Noah Taylor Run Time: 94 minutes

Country: United Kingdom Year: 2011 Language: English Distributor: Alliance Films Distributor Estimates Availability As: Current

Video: N/A

Ratings: ON 14A / BC PG / AB NR / SK PG / MB NR / PQ NR / Maritimes NR

“The excruciating and the hilarious mingle nearly to perfection in this marvelously visualized and deeply felt British film…” – Kyle Smith, New York Post