UK/USA
Feature Film | Comedy-Drama | English | 1h37m
Original Title: Sub Mar Ine
Dir: Richard Ayoade | Scr: Richard Ayoade | Novel: Joe Dunthorne | DP: Erik Wilson | Prod: Mary Burke, Mark Herbert, & Andy Stebbing | Mus: Andrew Hewitt & Alex Turner | Ed: Chris Dickens & Nick Fenton | PD: Gary Williamson
Cast: Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, Paddy Considine, Darren Evans
Short review | 319 words | 13/08/11 | 2010 favourites
15-year-old Oliver Tate experiences a momentous month in December, 1986. Firstly, he falls for the questionable charms of classmate Jordana Bevan, an eczema-suffering girl with a passion for casual bullying and arson, who is also something of an outsider – giving him a greater chance of successfully wooing her, which he manages to do with a bit of off-kilter courtship. Secondly, he begins to suspect that his mother is cheating on his depressed father with their quirky neighbour, who was her first love. Determined to both maintain and develop his burgeoning relationship and fix his parents’ ailing one, as the month progresses, he attacks both with relish. But when he learns of the ill-health of Jordana’s mother and finds his father’s passivity impossible to overcome, he becomes overwhelmed with fear and impotence, and is forced to face the very real prospect of seeing both relationships wither and die.
Packed with more directorial flourishes than a music video compilation, Ayoade’s feature debut never the less manages to avoid the empty flash that that image might conjure up by anchoring the film in its precocious, adolescent protagonist’s overactive mind. Every shot has a reason, and as such the result is often dazzling, rather than ostentatious. His screenplay, based on Joe Dunthorne’s novel, similarly avoids cutesiness by never straying very far from its teenaged hero’s voiceovered musings. Some of the dialogue, though, lacks period authenticity. However, it is Erik Wilson’s exquisite photography that is the pic’s real strength, perfectly capturing (or perhaps dictating) the film’s bitter-sweet tone. Less successful in this respect is Andrew Hewitt’s orchestral score, which concentrates on the bitter, neglecting the sweet – though Alex Turner’s original songs prove more effective. The performances, on the other hand, are generally all good, with Roberts’s being the pick of the bunch. The usually excellent Considine, however, struggles to make anything of his incongruously OTT character.
A beautifully photographed and affectingly acted bitter-sweet gem.
1000 Nights in the Dark: a collection of reviews of the single sentence, capsule, short, medium, and long variety, varying in length from fifty to a thousand-plus words, documenting my personal, exploratory journey through cinephilia.
