Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo
scooped unprecedented wins for a Singaporean movie in Best Feature Film, Best
New Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress (for Yeo
Yann Yann) at the 50th Golden Horse Awards this past week. (It was
also nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Chen Tianwen and Best Newcomer for
Koh Jiale.) This adds a major awards haul to the film’s fêted win of the Caméra
d’Or prize at Cannes this May, putting it on track to be Singapore’s first
nomination for Foreign Language Film at the upcoming 86th Academy
Awards.
These wins are no accident. Setting aside debates over what
counts as “best”, Ilo Ilo is perhaps
the most economical, understated and yet unpretentious feature film to have
emerged from Singapore’s post-independence movie scene. These traits make the
film a far more award-friendly bet internationally than others of its festival
ilk. In an extended-family reunion scene in the movie, Chen Tianwen’s character
waves off concern over his son’s bandaged arm with an “Oh, it’s nothing—he was simply
knocked down by a car.” This brief line of dialogue is emblematic of Anthony
Chen’s approach to the whole screenplay, which tends to downplay the
significance of distressing events, and even has a casually humorous
self-awareness about the extent of that downplaying.
This bent towards understatement fits perfectly with the
movie’s study of the ordinary lives of a Singaporean Chinese middle-class
family and their Filipino domestic worker, amidst the backdrop of late 1990s
economic recession, dual-income households, diasporic labour, and a generational
shift in national language policies. I have never seen a Singaporean film
better capture the ways that each family member (including Angela Bayani’s
Filipino character) tries to avoid bringing up things that might cause greater
stress to the others, or that might spark an argument they cannot bear to have.
It is anti-melodrama of the best kind: a pitch-perfect blend of the kinds of endurance,
ineloquence, mutual protection and conflict avoidance that can be said to
characterise the dynamics among traditional Chinese-educated middle-class
parents, their English-speaking latchkey children, and the foreign workers who
straddle the line between substitute mother and hired help.
As the mother in the family, Yeo Yann Yann’s character has
the thankless job of laying down the law where necessary, while giving in to
her husband’s bruised ego and her son’s wilfulness without taking the naggy matriarch-from-hell
route. Twice, when confronted with a confession from her husband, she opts for
a quiet simmering over volcanic flaring. The movie’s bluntest misstep might be
saddling her with a subplot to prove her fallible too, but even in dealing with
the aftermath, the movie shows off its consummate restraint and tenderness. It
hides her tearful shellshock behind a facial mask, and even proceeds to watch
her pull through as her husband gently drops another confession into her lap.
Abetted throughout by Chen’s sensitive writing and direction, Yeo tackles her
scenes with a weary watchfulness, always maintaining a tricky balance between
steely and resigned.
The other quiet heavyweight in the cast is Bayani’s Terry,
whom Chen has the good sense not to recast as a saint or martyr, as other Singaporean
foreign-worker films might be wont to do. Instead, he and Bayani imbue Terry with
a sense of humor, some minor failings, an unfaltering intelligence, and a
quietly principled way of not (literally) telling mum even when she isn’t in
the wrong. Her discreet firmness with the boy Jia Ler (played by Koh Jiale),
and their light-hearted chemistry together, contribute some of the movie’s
loveliest scenes, and anchors its eventual heart-aching conclusion. This
generous showcasing of Terry in different moods reflects a strength of the
movie in general, which never settles itself or its characters into a flatly
sombre (or didactic) tone.
Given these maternal impulses of emotional generosity and
restraint, I was not surprised to find Ilo
Ilo so well received by a Golden Horse jury presided over by Ang Lee, a
director who cut his teeth on drama-infused genre experiments that ceded far
more emotional space to their women than those genres usually do, and even
extended that gesture to its men (see, for example, his internationally acclaimed
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, and Lust Caution). The influence of Ang’s
work and that of other Taiwanese New Wave filmmakers is evident in Chen’s
movie, but so are the humble aesthetics and emotional sweetness of a Yasmin
Ahmad. Ilo Ilo is proof that a
Singaporean filmmaker like Chen can take these gifts for sensitivity, emotional
complexity, light comic touches, and trust in film audiences’ intelligence and
let them bloom in a full-length feature. Sure, the movie doesn’t quite boast a
jaw-dropping visual shot like the one in Chen’s masterful 2010 short film Lighthouse, in which a car chases a
cloud’s shadow as quickly as the latter recedes from a wheat field. But Chen is
only 29 years old. There is a world ahead, and time.
Written by Colin Low
