Submarine

UK movie audiences have always welcomed home-made films sporting horror, gangsters, troubled youngsters and madcap social comedy. Ambitious producers try to satisfy all markets simultaneously. First-time feature-film writer-directors find it wisest to test their talents with no more than two genres, as Norwegian-Nigerian Brit TV comedy writer-actor-director Richard (The IT Crowd) Ayoade did in 2010 with Submarine, an exceptional coming-of-age social comedy.

He adapted the quirky 2008 novel by young Welsh author Joe Dunthorne, telling the tales of Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an egocentric 15-year-old schoolboy who wants to have sex and get his parents' relationship out of a bad spell. Instead, to his angst-ridden adolescent dismay, his successfully seduced girl drops him. And his mother (Mike Leigh regular Sally Hawkins, a multi-awardee and Golden Globe winner for Happy-Go-Lucky) appears to have started an affair with an old fling and trendy New Age psychic (Paddy Dead Man's Shoes Considine).

The self-consciously self-obsessed boy, through wry off-screen commentaries, establishes the characters' backgrounds in the seaside South Wales community while revealing his own naivete and teenage arrogance. Throughout, from him and the other characters, there's a dazzling display of insightful moments of zany comedy, schoolyard bitchiness and family melodrama. The zombie-like depressed father (Noah Shine Taylor) provides a taped collection of happy and sad love songs to help his son cope with first romance, which has cheered his primly efficient wife who's been worried about her son's mental state and sexual inclinations.

Oliver loses his virginity to a fiendishly manipulative and self-protective girl, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), whose mother's got a brain tumour. The casting of the pair of edgy youngsters was crucial for Ayoade's old-fashioned "New Wave" style, in which close-ups of their acne and awkward body language is contrasted artfully with the mystical natural beauty and man-made industrial townscapes in which their dramas play out. Both Roberts (Welsh born) and Paige (a Londoner) are experienced TV child actors (Young Dracula and The Mysti Show respectively, among other series). They are enchanting as ironic, plain-faced star-crossed lovers.

Oliver's parents are underplayed handsomely, and Considine relishes his role as an actor-turned-shyster (whose faux-natural 15-minute promotional video is a highlight among the above-average set of DVD extras). Good cinematography, authentic-feeling production designs, and an unusually cerebral dialogue were blended well by Ayoade, providing a distinctive sense of humour, LOL at times, with a sense of emotional depth and psychological acumen.

When a movie has nothing to fault, and feels as it's achieved all its ambitions, it would be wrong to deny it a top rating just because it's a lightweight confection. So were many New Wave award-winners, and Submarine can be viewed as a classic of its kind too.