Innocents

For the longest time, Singapore films – at least those that reached a mainstream audience – were commonly criticised for their overly broad humour, shaky plots and unrealistic characters. In general, they pandered and talked down to their audiences, substituting slapstick for comedy and bypassing character development almost completely. It took Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo, which is still racking up big prizes in prestigious film festivals across the world, to prove that a little depth and darkness, if handled well, can engage rather than alienate audiences. Unfortunately, Ilo Ilo also serves as a powerful reminder of how difficult it is to strike that fine balance between art and entertainment. Writer-director Wong Chen-Hsi's Innocents makes a valiant – if not wholly effective – stab at incorporating a little more art and tragedy into her debut feature film.

Syafiqah (Nameera Ashley) is a quiet, responsible transfer student – a little girl so smart and dutiful that she's soon appointed class monitor. She is, quite literally, the diametric opposite of Huat (Cai Chengyue), a precocious little boy who turns up late for class, talks back to their teachers and constantly gets in trouble. Unexpectedly, Syafiqah befriends Huat, and they spend sun-dappled afternoons exploring the vast reservoir behind their school. As their friendship deepens, so do the secrets that they have promised each other to keep: whether it's a chilling discovery made in the massive canal cut through their playground, or the sad reality of Huat's troubled home life.

It's clear with every sepia-toned frame of Wong's film what she's trying to capture on screen: the easy dream-logic of a lighter, more innocent time, filtered through a haze of nostalgia. In some respects, she succeeds. The friendship between Syafiqah and Huat – both outsiders in their own ways – is played sweetly and purely, in the way that only children can interact: with no designs on each other or ulterior motives. Innocents also looks quite beautiful, courtesy of Joseph White's photography – the camera lends an off-kilter romance (in the strictly platonic sense) to the rambles the two children take across train tracks that used to lead up to Malaysia, slicing through the landscape that constitutes their own little world.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take long for Innocents to test the fortitude of even the most patient of viewers. At a relatively short running time of just 88 minutes, Wong's film is about twice as long as it really needs to be. Her story is almost painfully slight, with its more dramatic moments glossed over or buried too far beneath the surface. Each time Wong traces the children's path over again, Innocents loses a little more urgency. It's never quite clear, too, just when (or where) the film takes place, which is partly the point of it. But the few details Wong scatters within the film prove more distracting when they pop up than dreamy (Huat's uncle lives in Kelantan, which is an immediately odd fact).

It doesn't help that the dialogue Wong has crafted is, on occasion, frightfully pretentious. She drops enormous words and unwieldy chunks of exposition into the mouths of babes, which would be jarring and difficult to stomach as is. Ashley and Cai – who are otherwise generally good and appealing in their roles – are neither strong nor experienced enough actors to pull off their more ponderous dialogue. In this regard, the film fails to do full justice to some of the more lovingly observed moments between its two protagonists.

Innocents is very far from being one of the crassly commercialistic, ultimately disposable local movies that currently haunt our cineplexes. In fact, it's stubbornly, proudly the kind of film that's happy to dwell on the fringes of our local movie industry. But it's hard to shake the feeling that Wong takes her dedication to its art a little too far in the wrong direction. As a result, Innocents feels rather like a missed opportunity: a "tone poem", in Wong's own words, that never really manages to become an actual film.