Intended to "give voice to the voiceless", according to its
twentysomething director Royston Tan, 15 offers up a frenetic and
hyper-stylised portrait of a quintet of profoundly disaffected suburban
Singaporean teenagers. Utilising an entirely non-professional cast, and
drawing on their real-life experiences, it carries
echoes of Larry Clark's Kids in its fearless depiction of
truanting, bullying, body-piercing, self-harming, porn-watching,
drug-smuggling, prostitution, and HIV-infection.
Other filmmakers might have used this raw material to make a gritty,
quasi-documentary study of teen outsiders. Tan's background though
lies in music videos and he peppers his story with animated sequences,
sloganeering captions ("The world's most lethal drug - DESPAIR"), and
quick-fire editing, getting his characters to rap about gang violence
in front of the camera. There's an underlying purpose however to all
these attention-grabbing visual flourishes - they give us a sense of how
these skinny misfits perceive themselves to be tough-guy players in
some live-action game.
"THIS IS A TOUGH WATCH AT TIMES"
Not only are parents and authority figures almost entirely absent in
15, but so are female teenagers. Tan chooses to concentrate on the
emotionally intimate friendships that exist between the 'problem' boys,
who defiantly refuse to conform to conventional society. Beneath their
swaggering bravado and their cherished tattoos, what's revealed is
their vulnerability and frailty, and their reliance on one another for
support in an uncaring adult world. This is a tough watch at times,
yet there's a strain of black humour to 15, particularly in the search
by Shaun and Erick to find a suitable building from which their pal
Armani can commit suicide.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
15 (2005)
