Choo (Ranice Tay) wonders what it’s like to be the Merlion. Being made to stand there while everyone makes up stories about you, like you’re trapped in an aquarium and can only look out on the world. In an odd way, it reflects her own experience as an “ungovernable” young woman contending with an authoritarian culture led by entrenched patriarchy as mediated through her overly strict elite girls high school which is intent on producing “respectful daughters and students of virtue”.
The fact that Choo doesn’t quite it in here is signalled on her very first day in which she’s humiliatingly forced to drag her own desk from one classroom to another as a result of some sort of clerical error. A stern-looking teacher measures the diameter of the face on her wristwatch, decides it’s too large and, therefore, too masculine, and takes it away from her. They measure the length of her skirt above her knee and say it’s too short, while her hair is too long. Or rather, the style is wrong and she should make sure it doesn’t touch her collar by the following Monday. The teacher even pulls at her shirt as if she were about to tear it off to confirm the colour of her bra, though it is in no way visible and therefore presumably makes no real difference anyway.
Above the whiteboard in their classroom, there’s a sign reading “purity, moral uprightness, diligence, and filial piety,” all qualities Choo derides during her speech having been entered as a candidate to become class monitor against her will. She ends up ironically being made “Good Citizen” representative instead by her teacher, Mrs Lim, who takes an instant dislike to her and seems to regard Choo as a potential source of resistance. On the one level, the girls are all being encouraged to become proper young women and as Choo says despite her very feminine name, it doesn’t really suit her. Later, she becomes friends with another group of girls who ironically describe themselves as a “gang”, having realised the great figures they learn about in school and have streets named after them made their money peddling opium, only to be accused of actively participating in organised crime when their teacher finds a video of them dancing around to a street music video featuring a guy with tattoos and having fun in one of the girl’s bedrooms.
Choo and her friend Nessa (Nicole Lee Wen) had been worried about the video for another reason, that even though as Choo says they “technically didn’t actually do anything,” the video she shot of them messing around while trying to catch the ghost in her room could cause each of them a lot of trouble in the extremely conservative country where homosexuality was only decriminalised in 2022. In any case, the teacher doesn’t seem to pay any attention to that part of the video, which comes as a relief to both of them even if it’s made them guarded and awkward in the way they interact with each other. Nessa wants to quit swimming and try football instead, but doesn’t necessarily feel she has the freedom to make that decision and is fearful of its implications. “Can’t sleep, cannot eat, cannot freaking pee, can’t do anything,” another of the girls laments. “We can’t even study what we want.”
But having banded together over their shared sense of alienation, Choo’s friends are also separated by their socio-economic disparities. They mainly hang out at the house of the richest girl, Sofia (Lim Shi-An), whose father is a construction magnate. After deciding they all want to go to the same junior college, they struggle to agree on a destination as Sofia has her sights set on an elite institution the other girls think is out of their league given their current academic performance. Though she agrees to go to a less prestigious school with them, in reality Sofia can’t let go of her privilege or the expectation that goes with it and has secretly applied to the other school while trying to cajole the other girls to apply there too. Later it transpires that she’s already been given the answers to the exam questions by the tutor her wealthy mother hired, so there was never any doubt of her getting in because her money will always open doors. She shares the answers with the other girls to parrot back during in their oral which involves describing a picture of the iconic seafront to which the only “correct” answers are that the Merlion represents prosperity and national identity. Choo gives this answer too, but only to subvert it in asking what the point of this test is if they’re just supposed to give the “correct” answer while making it clear that she won’t go along with this charade even if it might be advantageous for her to do so.
The girls had taken refuge in a cave on the land being developed by Sofia’s father and created their own secret den, but when it’s taken down, erasing their history in the name of progress, it’s like they’re losing their last safe space where they can embrace these subversive thoughts and express their sense of frustration with the authoritarian culture around them as corporate forces seek to bury and obfuscate the past. Choo wonders how they can escape this “aquarium” and see a future for themselves when their history is constantly being revised and repackaged to reflect a certain ideology and they’re given so little freedom to think for themselves or to be who they really are in the culture where conformity is king. Yet though her camera and friendships, Choo does seem to have discovered a way to go on seeing, and speaking, the truth even if everyone else is content to ignore it.
Amoeba had its world premiere as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 