Even without the desk that she drags through the hallways of her new school as she looks for the right classroom at the Confucian Girls Secondary School in Singapore, Choo Xin Yu (Ranice Tay) looks as if she’s carrying a lot of weight around early in “Amoeba.” The teenager doesn’t receive a warm welcome from either her fellow students or her teacher, who immediately tells her that by the following Monday her hair won’t touch her collar and she isn’t thrilled to find out in the days to come that she’s been put up for a student election she’s almost certain to lose, though it only emboldens her to go for broke when she’s prompted to give a speech to the class, noting how she wouldn’t want the position because she would find it shameful to be a teacher’s servant.” When the speech wins over the class, if not the instructor, she ends up getting the kind of education that’s likely to stick as it becomes obvious anything from a textbooks is bound to be forgotten instantly as her fellow student Vanessa (Nicole Len Wen) is sure she had the votes to win even though she was told she lost and a quick peek inside the trash can with crumpled up ballots reveals she was right.
Although the faculty probably didn’t set out to instill a healthy distrust of authority in their student body, it’s suggested by writer/director Siyou Tan that it could be the most valuable lesson they could get in a country where tight regulations have had a habit of backfiring and history has a way of being rewritten by those in power at any given moment. Anyone anywhere at the age of Choo is likely to feel a tinge of rebellion, but Tan shows how the specific surroundings bring it out of her and her cohort on the precipice of graduating, entering a future that seems as uncertain because of their own prospects as the country’s as a whole when the foundation itself seems shaky. After her rallying cry of an election speech, she suddenly has a group of friends to hang out with in Vanessa, Gina (Genevieve Tan) and Sofia (Shi-An Lim), who mentions that the school is built on land where it’s rumored that all the corpses from World War II were dumped when they go down to the cave themselves to smoke and Choo isn’t impressed with the fact that the school is building a new sports complex with an Olympic-sized swimming pool when acknowledging any less savory aspects of the past would show far more progress. (She literally feels haunted at night, leading to an opening scene where Vanessa is beckoned to her apartment to suss out the ghost in her bedroom with a video camera.)
“Amoeba” settles into the same laid-back mischief-making narratively as starts to unfold on screen when the young women get an idea from Phoon (Jack Kao), an old friend of Sofia’s father, to make their partnership formal by calling themselves a gang, which has serious connotations should it ever be discovered by any of their parents or teachers, but is just a silly exercise for them. If Choo proves to be an inspiring leader with her flinty gaze and infectiously gleeful disobedience, Tay is a real discovery in playing her, having the pull to lead audiences through a mundane senior year where the gang entertains themselves with private jokes and extracurricular excursions. (More than once, they’re consigned to janitorial duties for their bad behavior, a punishment they have a way of turning into more fun.) The students may be written off already with admission even into a junior college not at all guaranteed – a fact that threatens to break up their friendship when some are a little more concerned about passing their finals than others – but Tan reveals how they’re hardly helped by a conformist culture that aims to tamp down the quirks of their personality rather than lean into it.
At times, “Amoeba” can come across slightly more unfocused than reflecting Choo’s easily distracted nature as it moves about her life at school and at home with various strands that don’t seem as if they’ll ever entirely cohere, but as the film builds to a climax of a test, Tan ends up passing with flying colors with a satisfying finale questioning the flawed metrics that the students are measured by. Digressions are a feature, not a bug here and going off-track ends up showing that ultimately “Amoeba” is on the right one.
“Amoeba” will screen again at the Toronto Film Festival at the Scotiabank on September 9th at 9:50 pm and September 10th at 6:55 pm.