The coming-of-age drama Sandcastle is busy enough, and dense enough, that it feels a great deal better than is the case, strictly speaking and trying to be objective about it. Truthfully, is is not a particularly adventurous film in a great many ways, fighting a sometimes losing battle with writer-director Boo Junfeng's inexperience and fixation of topics that aren't always as trenchant as he seems to believe. The flipside is that the film explores issues of history and memory in a far more nuanced manner than its bare-bones scenario - what happens during the summer before 18-year-old En (Joshua Tan) enters his mandatory stint in the Singaporean military - would ever suggest.

Taking place sometime around the turn of the millennium - the summer of 1999, if I'm interpreting some of the set design properly - Sandcastle follows En to his grandparents' home after his mother (Elena Chia) heads off the visit China with her boyfriend (Samuel Chong), a military douchebag whose attempts to be a new father figure to En have, thus far, gone rather poorly. It is while helping his grandfather take care of his Alzheimer's-suffering grandmother that En starts to hear stories and see photographs that he has never heard and seen before; there's a whole universe of family history, in fact, that he has been kept entirely ignorant of for all of his life. It turns out that his late father, many years earlier, was involved in student protests, and his exile to Malaysia (where he died when En was still a wee child) was the result of his being labeled a communist by the Singapore government.

The film is at its best when it's playing with ideas of generational politicking and the impact of history on a present day obsessed with "now"-ness. Boo is interested not just in what things are communicated between e.g. a grandfather and grandson, but how that communication takes place, exploring the possibilities and the limitations of oral histories, photography, video, and even computers (all of En's tangible memories are stored on the hard drive of a computer that may or may not survive its trip to a repair shop; his agitation at its fate is one of the most satisfyingly understated threads in the whole movie). The film opens on archival footage of the very same protests that so dramatically changed the life of En's father, while a vocal choir in which En sings performs a rousing, only moderately specific anthem to Singapore's strengths as a nation; this raises a series of questions about the relationship between Singapore's self-identity and its historic truths, that percolate throughout the movie (particularly in reference to En's fairly bland lack of understanding about his country, in matters as elemental as its independence from British rule in the 1960s). Sandcastle, when it is working at top form, happily mires itself in the idea that the past's influence on the present is too easily ignored, and it is explicitly the process of learning about his own and his country's past that allows En to become a more mature person.

That said, En's coming-of-age story is awfully familiar when it's not functioning as an historical inquiry. I'll admit to it taking some unexpected turns: 15 minutes in, I was positive that it was going to be about the sullen teen spending the summer with his grandfather and being made aware of his own shallowness as a result, and by the 25-minute mark, the grandfather was dead. Still, the story hits many well-trod beats: En's rebellious, antagonist relationship with his mother's asshole boyfriend is not at all enlightening or clever or anything but boilerplate; and the young Chinese woman (Bobbi Chen) who flirts with En and eventually relieves him of his virginity feels jammed into the movie because dammit, all coming-of-age stories need to have the bit where the protagonist has his first love.

None of this would be fatal, except that Boo seems blindly committed to treating his story as though it were the most important, fascinating thing in the world, rather than a simple, delicate family story. The film is marked, throughout, by a stately pace - a less polite individual might rather use the adjective "glacial", and a pronounced use of static shots, and water imagery. A gravely serious aesthetic, and when the film is aimed at En's dawning awareness that there is a whole vasty history of Singapore that he's never cared about, being too involved in his own navel, the stateliness, the monolithic quality of the imagery is well-suited. It is the visual approximation of the weight of history creeping up behind the young man, taking him unawares. But Boo does not discriminate; he shoots everything in the same way, up to and including the moment when En tricks his mom's boyfriend by giving him a pornography video to use in a business presentation.

Within this film, one can see the outline of a new filmmaker worth watching: Boo has a good sense for framing, and a brilliant command of his cast, who are without exception good, and often more than that (Tan's quizzical, vacant performance of En would sound terrible if I tried to describe it, but it is the anchor that manages to keep the more clichéd coming-of-age tropes from drifting into nothing). He needs a little more discipline, perhaps, and more age: my suspicion is that Sandcastle is in many ways so personal for the filmmaker that he can't quite take the objective approach to the material that would serve it better (born in 1983, Boo was but a year or two younger than En in whatever year this takes place). Obviously, personally felt art is no crime. But in the particular case of Sandcastle, a bit less personality might have helped the filmmaker's nascent talent shine, rather than fitfully beam through a thicket of bland conventions.

7/10