Choo is a delinquent student at Confucian Girls School. Frustrated by school officials micromanaging their students at every turn, she pushes back by finding ways to fuck things up.
This draws her to fellow misfits Sofia Tay, Vanessa and Gina who hang out at construction sites. A talk w/ Sofia’s driver (and former Triad member) Uncle Phoon provides them with the next step: start a gang. It goes as well as you’d expect.
The film is set in Singapore.
Haven't seen a lot of Singaporean films. Only got into them recently and it's really just these two: "Eating Air" by Kelvin Tong & Jasmine Ng and "7 Stories". Saw Kelvin Tong's "The Maid" before that more than a decade ago. And that's it.
What I noticed is that these are all attempts to humanize Singapore's cold & shiny image by looking at it on a ground level and dealing with its imperfections. And what they would often lean on is the notion that Singapore is a fishing village and hawker haven forced into urbanization & rapid development because it had to be a country in 1965.
Obviously a young country that has to deal with a lot of shit & figure things out about itself.
The film reflects this as it captures Choo at that moment of unease, haunted by the ghosts of the past & the harshness of the future and meeting people who were there at her nation's birth.
But it goes a little further by addressing what these well-intended movies seem to skirt around: that Singapore is ruled by a repressive capitalist regime. Elephant in the room. Or shall we say...merlion?
That's the context we need, especially in terms of these characters and what they & their country are trying to reckon with. The way the film combats mythologization pushes it past Kelvin Tong & into Sonny Liew territory.
Outside of its brilliant discourse, this film is a tour de force. Director Siyou Tan stages the scenes like a veteran in her feature length debut & draws out a lot of mesmerizing images w/ DOP Neus Ollé. '90s-2000s coded in its sound & fury that I'm glad wasn't made in the '90s or 2000s where it would've ended up glorifying American hedonism against the 'stuck up' East, w/c isn't liberating.
It's all about asking the right questions.
- Carlo Cielo
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