Old Yorker

  • Ilo Ilo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anthony Chen (2013)

    In an ‘Academy Conversations’ piece on the AMPAS website, the thirty-year-old writer-director Anthony Chen, whose first feature this is, explains the autobiographical element of Ilo Ilo.  Chen tells the interviewer Brian Rose about the Filipino maid Teresa (‘Terry’) who worked for Chen’s family in Singapore for much of his childhood and whose eventual return home to the Philippines upset him deeply.  Chen says that he wanted to explore how it was possible for someone who wasn’t a blood relative to become so emotionally important to him.  (It seems wholly unsurprising for a child to get attached to anyone who’s a constant presence in their formative years but never mind.)   Jiale, Anthony Chen’s alter ego in the film, has his tenth birthday halfway through the story, which takes place in 1998 – when Chen himself would have been fourteen years old.   Chen has made this adjustment in order to make the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s a central element of Ilo Ilo.   The film is engrossing but relentlessly downbeat.   Each of the principal roles – Jiale, his mother Hwee Leng, his father Teck and the maid Terry – is well written and played.  None of the events that occur is in itself implausible.  But the cumulative effect of these events, in combination with the persuasive naturalistic acting, is to make you not only feel unhappy but also realise that Chen is determined to have nearly everything go wrong for the family and for Terry.   His decision to fuse the recollection of sadness in his own life with the larger traumatic experience of recession in one of Asia’s tiger economies is symptomatic of this piling on of misery.

    Ilo Ilo’s contrived pessimism is a serious limitation but this doesn’t detract from Chen’s handling of the cast or from his and their achievement in developing interesting characters.   The way in which Jiale and his mother, neither of whom is at all sympathetic at the start, become more complex and engaging, without undergoing a dramatically convenient personality change, is particularly impressive.  Jiale, an only child, is badly behaved at school and home – demanding, selfish, insensitive, perhaps borderline OCD.   (It’s for the audience to decide how he got to be like this; whether this is how Anthony Chen recalls his boyhood self or Jiale is seeking attention because his mother is pregnant or is responding to the tensions between his parents – or a combination of all three.)  The bond that develops between Jiale and Terry is convincing because the boy doesn’t turn much nicer as a result:  it’s just that you become more aware of his emotional neediness and what he’s prepared to do in order to satisfy this need.   Chen directs twelve-year-old Koh Jia Ler, who’d never acted before, with great skill:  the boy is both expressive and closed off.   Yann Yann Yeo is superb as his mother:  a secretary in a shipping firm, Hwee Leng spends much of her working day typing letters for her boss to send to other employees in the firm telling them their services are no longer required.  Hwee Leng realises at an early stage that her rather hopeless husband (Tian Wen Chen) has lost his job as a salesman – he gets paid-by-the-hour work as a security guard instead – although Teck doesn’t know she knows until much later.  The unsmiling Hwee Leng seems cold and humourless:  it’s hardly surprising that Jiale is increasingly drawn to the warm, amiable Terry (Angeli Bayani).  But Yann Yann Yeo gradually reveals layers of anxiety, resentment and a strong sense of responsibility behind Hwee Leng’s sullenness.  This makes the character compelling.

    There’s a particularly good moment when Hwee Leng sits on a bench in the street and a wind blows some leaflets around her feet.  She bends to pick them up:  the impulse to do this may be just an expression of this tetchy, tidy woman’s irritation at the mess the leaflets have made but when she looks at them they contain details of a self-help scheme that catches her interest.   Each of the four main characters attempts to find a way of making the money they need for their life to be happier.  Hwee Leng, to her chagrin, proves herself as much of a sucker as her husband has already shown himself to be.   For his part, Jiale reckons he’s found a key to winning the national lottery and Terry is trying to earn money in Singapore sufficient to fund the upkeep of her own son back home.   (I assume the film’s title refers to the province of that name in the Philippines.)   Although I found Ilo Ilo overdetermined, I’ll be interested to see what Anthony Chen and his fine cast, especially Yann Yann Yeo, do next.

    11 May 2014

  • I Wish

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kiseki

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (2011)

    Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest is hard not to like but harder still to get really interested in.  Kore-eda sees good in all the people in his movies.  At the same time, he’s always aware that human relationships tend to fail and his characters are often lonely or disappointed or at odds with each other.  His Still Walking was praised for its ‘gentleness’ – a judgment which seemed to me not only condescending but inaccurate:  the film is tough-minded as well as compassionate.   I Wish – about two young brothers, separated as a result of their parents’ divoice – merits the description given to Still Walking, perhaps because Kore-eda’s kind-heartedness is even more thoroughgoing with children in the main roles.   He gets fresh and rich characterisations from all concerned – especially the two real-life brothers Koki and Oshiro Maeda, who play, respectively, twelve-year-old Koichi, who lives with his mother and maternal grandparents in Kagoshima, and the younger Ryunosuke (‘Ryu’), who’s with his father in Fukuoka.  Koki Maeda’s appearance kept reminding me of the Wilderness Scout in Up but he’s much more than a cartoon:  the thoughtful Koichi is old enough to know how to put on a variety of masks, as the occasion requires.  Several of the other children make an impression – notably Kyara Uchida, as Megumi, a teenage girl whose ambition to be an actress is constrained by her mother’s resentment about what happened to her own acting career, and Seinosuke Nagayoshi, as Makoto, one of Koichi’s schoolfriends, who is so attached to his little, aged dog Marble that, when it dies, the boy carries its corpse round in his bag and keeps hoping against hope that Marble will come back to life.

    Koichi too has supernatural longings.  The unlovely neighbourhood in which he now lives is in the shadow of a semi-active volcano, Sakurajima.  Its ashes are part of the local atmosphere but Koichi wants Sakurajima to erupt, so that he and his mother have to be evacuated back to Fukuoka.   Kagoshima and Fukuoka are stops on the line of the Bullet Train service which is about to open.  Koichi imagines that, if he and Ryu meet at the midpoint of the line, at a place called Kawashiri; and if he (Koichi) wishes, at the moment the trains pass each other, for the family to be reunited, then his wish will come true.  The film’s Japanese title translates as ‘miracle’:  the register of the English ‘I wish’ is different.  You can understand why it was chosen:  it’s a more accurate description of the children’s desires generally (the laws of nature won’t require suspension in order for Megumi to succeed as an actress); and ‘miracle’ might sound portentous.  Even so, ‘I wish’ has a softer and more sentimental flavour.  This probably reinforced my sense that Kore-eda goes too far in obscuring the sadness of I Wish under cover of its charm.

    At the crucial moment – as the trains pass – Kore-eda inserts a montage of the film’s key images up to this point.  The images are not flashbacks as such but, as Tony Rayns says in his S&S review, they’re fully recognisable from earlier in I Wish.  They’re beautiful both as a composition and individually (especially some pink-purple flowers, which we saw the children walking among).  But the neatness of the images seems to limit their power – and to encapsulate the structure of the film as a whole.   Each episode within it, while carefully and sensitively composed, is frustrating in its self-containment.  The visual scheme is clever and charming – the primary colours in daylight exteriors often suggest the newly-minted world of childhood experience and contrast with the muddy interiors of the houses the kids live in yet I found this distinction more tidy than expressive.  I Wish divagates geographically – fair enough for a story in which the physical distance between characters is a pivotal element.  It lacks, though, the sustained tension of Still Walking – in which the action, once the characters were assembled for their unhappy family reunion, stayed rooted within and around the one house, and conveyed both the unignorable tensions and the distances between people.  The best moment in I Wish, for me, occurs when Koichi and Ryu, comparing each other’s height after months of separation, stand back to back:  it’s as if their bodies are pulling them towards each other while their minds, although the brothers’ faces are smiling, realise that reunion wouldn’t be a simple matter.

    All the adult actors are good.  They include Nene Ohtsuka as the boys’ mother; Joe Odagiri, as their father, a would-be indie rocker; and Isao Hashizume, as the grandfather whose repeated attempts to bake the sponge cake he used to enjoy are a sadly amusing take on Proust – the old man’s nostalgic commitment to the task is rather undermined by the underwhelming taste of the product.   Several of the cast of Still Walking are here, in smaller roles but it’s a pleasure to see them again – Yui Natsukawa as Megumi’s mother, Kirin Kiki as the boys’ grandmother, and, especially, Hiroshi Abe, as Koichi’s school teacher.

    13 February 2013

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