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