15

Royston Tan / Special Presentations / Singapore / 2003 / 90 mins / Mandarin with English subtitles / Color / 35mm

Rarely do they raise Cain in the city-state of Singapore, unless it’s the cane of corrective authority—at least that’s the official view from that miracle of orderly prosperity. Royston Tan has a very different take: his reeling, irreverent first feature dredges up the overlooked underbelly of teen dropouts, druggies and dead-enders, played by street punks from the Lion City. Random… Show more bashings and ritual piercings barely conceal the brutal monotony of this artificial Eden. 15 is saturated with the artifacts of hyper-distraction—mock video games, crazed captions, frantic karaoke, even an animated “Suicide Manual”—spectacle designed to colonize the psyches of these kids, converting their fragile desires into consuming impulses. Tan’s stinging satire finds hope beneath the angst; tough punks who wear their nihilism like a name-brand fashion, these proto-agonists are, after all, just kids looking for a way in. Still, the darkly outrageous 15 can’t imagine sweet sixteen.

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