Ilo Ilo is filled with sweetness, humour and humanity: so assured and accomplished that it's hard to believe this is a first feature. What an impressive debut from 30-year-old Singaporean writer-director Anthony Chen, who graduated four years ago from Britain's National Film and Television School. In its gentleness, its shrewd psychological insight and unforced accumulation of detail, his film is something to be compared with the work of Taiwanese director Edward Yang.
The story is a domestic drama, with an addictive hint of soap, avowedly autobiographical and based on the director's own childhood experiences of being cared for (along with two siblings) by a maidservant from the Philippines: the title is a Mandarin phrase meaning "mum and dad not at home". Interestingly, the little boy at the movie's centre is an unspeakably obnoxious brat: imperious, manipulative, slightly obsessive-compulsive. Perhaps all film directors have a little of these qualities somewhere in their pasts.
Nine-year-old Jiale (Koh Jia Ler) is the son of two stressed working parents in late-1990s Singapore when the economy was tanking and people feared for their jobs. Tian Wen Chen plays the father, Teck, a truly terrible salesman whose attempts to demonstrate his supposedly "unbreakable" glass lead to disaster. Yann Yann Yeo is Jiale's mum, Hwee Leng, short-tempered and distracted. Jiale's beloved grandpa, who had been notionally minding Jiale after school, has died, and now his parents have decided to hire a live-in maid for childcare and general domestic duties. This new development, along with the fact that Hwee is pregnant, makes Jiale even more insecure; Chen shows how the boy senses and absorbs his parents' own anxiety and feeds it back to them in the form of terrible behaviour.
It is in this fraught family nest that the new maid must make herself at home as best she can. This is Teresa, or Terry, tremendously played by Angeli Bayani. She receives in submissive silence the news that she is to be hardly more than a serf: the new mistress demands Terry's passport from her as soon as she walks in and fails to reprove her son in any meaningful way for the appalling way he talks to Terry.
This group rests on a cat's-cradle of secrets and lies and cover-ups. Every one of these four people is lying about money. Teck goes through the motions of leaving for work every day, desperate to conceal the truth about his actual employment situation and his stock-market gambles with the family savings. Hwee Leng is privately fascinated with a certain dodgy entrepreneur and his self-improvement seminars. Terry is secretly doing weekend work for cash as a hairdresser, and Jiale is neglecting his schoolwork while he develops a system for predicting the national lottery winning numbers – a system which the school principal finds worryingly plausible. Meanwhile, when Jiale gets into trouble, Terry instinctively covers up for him and enables his behaviour patterns, sensing that denouncing the boy to his mother can only result in being fired.
Yet the miracle that Chen conjures from this poisonously dysfunctional setup is that Jiale and Terry begin to bond, probably beginning with a shocking incident that follows an accident with the balcony washing line. It is partly a Stockholm-syndrome symptom but also a genuine friendship, something that replaces an actual mother-child relationship. Yet the relationship that it replaces is not that of Jiale and Hwee Leng, but Jiale and her own baby, left behind in the Philippines. Terry has been allowed to wear Hwee's old cast-off clothes and poignantly begins to dress and behave like Jiale's real mother.
What gives this situation its force is that the division between rich and poor is not as clear as it appeared at the beginning. In the globalised labour market, Singapore's professional classes are well able to employ those from the Philippines and devolve to them the duties of caring for and perhaps even caring about their children. But Chen shows how there is arrogance and hubris here. When the economy contracts, their haughty attitude is brutally exposed. Could it be that Chen intends Jiale, that pampered prince, to be a satirical embodiment of Singapore itself: cosseted, spoilt and entitled? Certainly those of us who have heard apocryphal tales and scare stories about Singapore's tough law-enforcement and its corporal punishment will find a certain scene very difficult to watch.
Ilo Ilo is a story told with enormous sympathy and flair, and an almost novelistic skill in getting inside the principals' heads. Chen is a real film-maker to watch.
