Ayoade: Submarine (2010)

Submarine, Richard Ayoade's debut directorial feature, is based on Joe Dunthorne's novel of the same name, a coming-of-age story set in 1980s Swansea. It's a highly self-conscious film that's very much indebted to Dunthorne's prose style: there's far more interior monologue than dialogue, as solipsistic misfit Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) reflects upon the breakdown of his parents' marriage, as well as his infatuation with Jordana (Yasmin Paige). Part of what makes Oliver sympathetic is that Jordana's not an especially likeable character, at least not at first - and her mild contempt, which never completely vanishes, imbues their romance with something of the drab, verbose melancholy of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole series, and Adrian's fixation with Pandora in particular. Still, Ayoade's most striking influence comes from across the Atlantic, since this very much plays as Wes Anderson drawn from an 80s British palette, rather than a 60s American palette – specifically, like how Anderson might look if he’d started as an 80s graphic designer, or typographer, rather than a 90s director, since there’s an extraordinary fixation with recovering the visual pleasures of the printed word. There’s text in nearly every frame, flamboyantly analog in its typography and often pointedly cinematic – text that preceded the familiarity with fonting and formatting ushered in by the PC revolution - suffusing Ayoade’s mise-en-scenes with the romance of film posters and title sequences, the random notations at the beginning and end of home movie reels. That makes it quite a compositionally ingenious and ideogrammatic film – printed as much as  directed, it wouldn’t feel that different as a series of single images, or a coffee table book of stills.  And it's the irrevocability of print that finally offsets the film's indie quirkiness, channelling it into the utter fatalism and despair that Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor bring to their performances as Oliver's parents – for all Oliver’s solipsism, it’s their story that’s finally told.