Submarine

Based on Joe Dunthorne's novel, Submarine is the story of a middle-class boy's pained adolescence in Wales. Nothing special distinguishes Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), except a fondness for narrating in anxious voiceover and visualising his mundane life as a film, complete with references to camera angles. At one emotional point, he feels that his story calls for a sweeping crane shot, but admits, "Unless things get better, the biopic of my life will only have the budget for a zoom out" – which, of course, is what the camera gives us.

Fifteen-year-old Oliver suffers from romantic yearnings, routine bullying at school, a gloomy home life and the acute self-consciousness of a precocious sophisticate. "I've tried smoking a pipe," he muses, "flipping coins – listening exclusively to French crooners" – cut to a Serge Gainsbourg LP sleeve – "I've even had a hat phase" – cut to Oliver at the family dinner table, acting as if the blue Stetson on his head weren't really there.

When Oliver falls for classmate Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige), she rather brings out the worst in him. Jordana seems to enjoy bullying – "in moderation", he observes – so Oliver tries to impress her by helping to torment another girl. It's a shocking moral lapse, but it does the trick, and Oliver and Jordana embark on a gauche liaison. "I've already turned these moments into the Super-8 footage of memory," he says, and the film gives us a sweet, scrappy montage that's a textbook illustration of first love remembered – seashores, bicycles and all. Their trysts have an appealing air of big children playing at adulthood, not quite ready to grow up.

And why would they want to grow up? If the playground world is beset with horrors, adult life is appalling – especially in mid-Eighties Wales. Oliver's mother Jill (Sally Hawkins, trussed up in the ungainly skirts and dainty bows of the period) is bored rigid, while father Lloyd (Noah Taylor) is a marine biologist in lugubrious beige. To Oliver's concern, Jill is taking an interest in her ex-beau Graham (Paddy Considine), a strutting dork of a New Age guru. All mullet, leather strides and spacehead rhetoric – "I'm a prism! That's not mad, OK?" – Considine's turn is fun, albeit incongruously sitcom-broad for Submarine's otherwise wry observational delicacy.

Notes:

Beautifully filmed,Editing using photo imagery, colour fades, varied shots, RED, BLUE, epilogue, chapter 1 texts, WITTY, expressionless faces - express more!, Paddy Constantine!, beach scenes, VERY FUNNY.