In a pivotal scene of The 400 Blows, sweet-tempered Antoine, forever and unjustly underfoot, discovers Balzac while smoking a rollie on his parents’ sofa. Everything in Antoine’s home belongs to his parents, and they rarely let him forget it, but Eureka! — Balzac might be his alone. Inspired by “A Sinister Affair” to write an essay about his grandfather’s death for a class assignment, Antoine finds himself accused of plagiarism, and indeed at least one verbatim Balzac passage made it onto the page. He runs up against the limits of influence as definitively as he does those of authority and ultimately the inhabitable earth, bound itself by the sea.
Truffaut’s famous final shot of Antoine running toward that limit, then turning back, frozen in a glimpse of bereft confusion, is referenced twice in Submarine, writer and director Richard Ayoade’s arch, superstylized adaptation of a contemporary coming-of-age novel by Joe Dunthorne. Submarine’s hero Oliver (Craig Roberts) — cast in the appealingly anemic mold wrought by Dustin Hoffman’s Graduate and recently seen in light underdog odes like Rocket Science and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World — sees his life in cinematic terms, directing his encounters as they happen and parsing out big moments with the according camera moves. Like the inevitably cited Holden Caulfield, he is the self-reflexive center of the story, which in this case means much of his time is spent lamenting his life’s lack of drama, scheming to cook some up, and cursing the results for failing to conform to a cinematic ideal.
In the novel Oliver is the unreliable narrator…
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