Submarine

In a complex unfolding of events,Alex Turner and Submarine led me to each other.

It was like this-listening to Alex’s solo work for the film was what made me fall decisively in love with him,and the music got me interested in the film.

The distinct aesthetic-purposefully juvenile,a quirky understated one-of the film caught my eye in fan made music videos for the songs,and it held my gaze once again when I watched the film.

The protagonist is a high school boy-awkward,cowardly,sometimes mean and selfish,sometimes not but definitely unheroic. He belongs to the inherently flawed,seemingly causelessly tormented trope of adolescent so popularly seen in coming of age narratives-determined to seem okay,determined to fit in.

He lives in a village in England with his parents and has a love interest in his classmate,Jordana.

Oliver’s world seems a calm.orderly one and largely stays so,but there are events here and there that cause ripples in otherwise calm water-betraying a bewildering turbulence behind the apparently unremarkable and mundane.

Submarine isn’t a film about the ostensibly exemplary. It shows an unremarkable boy’s unremarkable life,and in doing so,it does a lovely job of capturing the adolescence experience.

It doesn’t show you anything that hasn’t already been seen,tell you much that hasn’t already been talked about at length.

It is,however,beautifully shot,beautifully made and monumentally heartwarming.

The characters are lifelike,flaws and all,and endearing for all that.

What Submarine promises is more an experience than a movie-the music and the visuals unite to bring to the audience a vividly realistic slice of life,as it is known and lived by a teenage boy who clambers awkwardly on the way to adulthood,falling and scraping his knees,it is true but learning and never ceasing to move along,aware though he may or may not be of the fact.