Amoeba

Bluesky

“We are respectful daughters and students of virtue,” sing the girls, lined up neatly in their white uniforms outside Confucian Girls’ Secondary School, which is about to celebrate its 200th anniversary. Choo Xin-yu (Ranice Tay) is new to the school, chided for the length of her skirt on the first day. In due course they will label her ungovernable. But Choo, as she is known, isn’t an uninterested student. She loves learning. Neither is she timid or disinclined to connect with others. She wants to form a gang.

“Loyalty, righteousness, brotherhood, truth.” These, says Uncle Phoon (Jack Kao), are the foundations of a gang. Uncle Phoon works in construction. He’s attached to the site where the new sports complex and Olympic-size school swimming pool are being built, before work there is halted because what might be important artefacts are discovered beneath the ground. Having nowhere else to go to hang out. Choo and her friends begin to make use of the cave revealed by the excavation. Physical and metaphorical layers pile on top of one another as the four of them, their association condemned by a country still paranoid about gang behaviour decades after it mattered, literally go underground.

There’s no getting away from the past in Siyou Tan’s Toronto International Film Festival hit – though for the teachers and other authority figures who try to remain there gradually come to understand, neither is there any way to escape being dragged into the future. There may be a ghost in Choo’s room (or so she believes) some lingering spirit of one whose time is over – but she and her friend Sofia (Lim Shi-an) use modern technology to try to evidence it. This also gives them an opportunity to spend time alone together and acknowledge a different kind of closeness that has been simmering throughout.

Distinctive cultural phenomena emerge in what it in many ways a portrait of modern Singapore. Whilst some of the girls are pressured to attend cram schools, and there’s a suggestion that good grades are everything, what they want to do is make YouTube videos in which they talk about how tough they are whilst posing to po tunes. Uncle Phoon teaches them how to walk. “Your stare must be piercing,” he tells them. He also lets Choo ride in his car as it goes through the car wash, like a much younger child. it is the state, however, which seems at time more childish, pushing its imaginary view of history, trying to compel the girls to talk about the merlion – the country’s mascot – in the most ridiculous terms. Put in charge of a school show which is supposed to celebrate this narrative, Choo flounders. There are always kids who struggle to take school seriously, but in this case, it really might be the school (and education department) that’s to blame.

Siyou Tan expertly captures that indignities of the teenage years, when life is heavily restricted by arbitrary rules. When she crosses one of the many lines that surround her, some of them visible and some invisible, Choo has her hand beaten with a ruler. Repeated efforts are made to separate her from her friends. She is told that she will never get ahead in life unless she conforms, and has every reason to believe that’s true. But she is endowed with a rare spirit, bolstered in turn by the warmth of those intense friendships, and even as she waits for life to start, she resists the erasure of history, strives to uncover truths and to access a bigger world. She does so with a charismatic vigour that is compelling to watch.

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