Singaporean filmmaker, Royston Tan, has perfectly blended both the ‘real’ and the ‘reel’ together in his 2003 feature film, 15, which features five fifteen-year-old male youths, Melvin, Shaun, Vynn, Erick and Armani, who are all real-life gangsters, casted from the streets of Singapore by the filmmaker himself. The film portrays the lives of these five youths in a highly realistic fashion; with almost zero prior scripting, and the use of a raw and intrusive camera perspective, where the actors themselves play out their real lives for the public camera eye. In 15, the five youths are able to represent themselves as candidly as possible, to an audience that has otherwise ignored and neglected them in the past, and in the process, have successfully reclaimed their own voices in a society where their voices are deliberately being muffled. The themes of alienation, escapism, and disconnection with one’s body stand out strongly in the film, and are to me what makes the voice of this particular community of subaltern people especially resounding.

704.04MB; 15 - Fifteen (Royston Tan, 2003) Dvdrip Xvid-Mediamaniacs.avi 699.92MB; Creature. Registered company NI606469 GULLION DEVELOPMENTS Ltd 12 Torrent Business. AHD HANDYMAN LIMITED, 3. 15 Directed by Royston Tan The adventure of five 15 year old boys in Singapore: estranged to every social reference, except for that of appearance and close friendships, they live their lives distant from their families and school, passing their days in a complete state of indolence in the search of experiences, at times even physically painful.

As Royston Tan has put forward in an interview with online channel- SGFilm: “I think a good story is something that connects to the heart. The moment there’s a connection between you and the audience, you have already won the battle halfway.” (Tan, 2013)

Royston Tan 15 Degrees

Fans of Royston Tan's unconventional debut film '15' will soon be able to wear their hearts on their sleeves, quite literally. On June 30, 2021, the film will manifest in the form of a apparel.

15 is definitely a movie that hits home with the Singaporean film watcher, as it depicts the lives of five juvenile street gangsters, or better known as ‘Ah Bengs’ in local heartland colloquial terms. To begin with, throughout the whole duration of watching the film, I had the constant feeling that I was being assigned the role of the prying eye of society, intruding and trespassing into the privates lives of these juvenile gangsters, and subjecting them to my own personal judgement of them. It is a painful reminder of how these marginalised youths are unable to escape societal judgement, be it in reel life or real life, because society is unable to identify with their lives of violence and self-inflicted pain. This is true to what Royston Tan has to say about Singaporean films- it must have a intriguing storyline, and also the power to connect with and impact the audience.

Alienation is a central concern in the film, and there is a constant sense of alienation from one’s environment, depicted primarily by immobility and paralysis in the urban landscape. All five youths in the film appear to be trapped within the cityscape, becoming inherently stationary and unmoving in empty spaces, for example, under the void deck, in the playground, their own homes in housing board estates, and also building rooftops. Their restricted movements in these urban spaces symbolise their displacement from their own country, where they are unable to fit into the cookie-cutter mould of a typical Singapore-educated citizen, and as a result, are not able to share in their country’s progression. Hence, there is the constant feeling of alienation and imprisonment in one’s own environment.

This sense of alienation is emphasised by the apparent lack of a parental authority in the film. The actors all come from dysfunctional families, with absent parental figures in their lives. In fact, the presence and voice of a positive adult figure is entirely missing from the film. The five boys exist in a setting where they are independent from society, completely functional in their own alienated world. Adding onto that aspect, they are all working-class youths that can neither identify with being a normal teenager, or a working adult, and are thus a marginal sub-category that is self-reliant on their own. As a person’s identity is dependent on his history, family, community and society, the five youths develop no real sense of identities in the isolated habitat that they had self-constructed for themselves. Thus it is inevitable that they will become alienated even to themselves.

This predicament of being alien to other people, including themselves, brings me to the second issue of the obsession with the human anatomy. It is evident that the youths in the film, particularly, Shaun, Erick and Armani, revert to inflicting bodily pain on themselves in order to justify their existence, for example getting tattoos, facial piercings, and wrist-slitting etc. There is a need to claim possession of one’s own body by marking it with ink, piercings and cuts, precisely because they feel alien to themselves, due the absence of a self-identity. This inability to identify with oneself is heightened with the obvious instances of sexual confusion and tension experienced by the youths. There are subtle homosexual connotations, shown in scenes where the boys have extremely close and intimate bodily contact, for example, sleeping together on the same bed, smoking from the same cigarette, sucking blood off one’s face etc. It has been later revealed that the youth actors have “openly admitted that they were homosexual” in response to Royston Tan’s statement that they are not homosexual. (Wikipedia)

An excellent film, 15 does a great job showing a side of Singapore most people never see. While some viewers might object to the violence and graphic scenes of self-mutilation, the reality behind every scene had a lasting impression on me. Director Royston Tan should be commended for this haunting look into the lives of these five teenagers. 15 is a 2003 Singaporean coming-of-age black comedy-drama film about teenage gangsters in the Singapore suburbs. Directed by Royston Tan, the film is an expanded version of Tan's 2002 award-winning short film, also titled 15.

In the film, the youths indulge in heterosexual pornography, not because they gratify in it, but because they understand that it is a social activity that they have to engage in, in order to justify their manhood. Their consumption of pornographic material, like R-rated videos, and photos of naked women that they pin up on the walls, is almost methodical and involves no form of pleasure or gratification. On the flipside, it appears that in an event where two boys are consuming pornographic material together, both of them will always be constantly aware of the other’s presence in the room with himself, and develop a strong curiosity towards each others’ sex. The homoerotic sexual tension between Shaun and Erick, and Vynn and Melvin is very strong, and with the confirmation of the actors’ confused sexual identities, it becomes apparent that the youths feel alienated and disconnected from a society that prides itself on standardisation. (Cookie-cutter types)

The theme of fantasy and escapism is recurring in 15, as can be seen from the scenes involving the world of video games, music videos, comic drawings and surrealist images. Gang confrontations are presented in street fighting game styles, the actors’ rapping of Hokkien dialect gang chants are performed like Hollywood music videos, and grotesque depictions of suicides are conferred through comic strips. There is a scene in Vynn’s house, when the camera shifts over to a fish tank, and the atmosphere changes from being tense, to a state of peace and calm that borders on being dreamlike and surreal. The momentary act of viewing the fish tank appears to launch the actors into a dreamlike state, where they are able to temporarily escape from reality, and relax in a state of nostalgia and memory. This idea of escaping from reality to fantasy further promotes the sense of alienation that the youths feel in their society, as they no longer know how to differentiate between fantasy and reality.

All in all, 15 is a powerful film that resurfaces the societal problem of the neglected and ignored subaltern communities of people in modern day Singapore, in its case- juvenile gangsters who cannot fit into any of society’s constructs, and are thus displaced from the environment. Through his film, Royston Tan has not only successfully recovered the voice of the subaltern juvenile gangsters, but has gone one step further to amplify that voice.

Works Cited

Tan, Royston. SGFilm Chat Royston Tan. 2 Sep. 2000. Web. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6q5pcw1-AA>

Royston Tan 15 full movie, online

“15 (film).” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 20 Sep. 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_(film)>