Ilo Ilo (2013)

Touches You

Let's be realistic.

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

ILO ILO is a breath of fresh air in the complex, exciting world of Asian cinema. I hadn't seen any films before dealing with Singaporean society so I was looking forward to watching this one and I wasn't disappointed. ILO ILO is a beautifully shot, beautifully acted family drama and I find it hard to believe that the director was only in his 20s when he made this. What a talent! The story is a small-scale one designed to highlight the melting pot of cultures and identities that co-exist in the city state. The main character is a Filipino maid who comes to look after the spoilt son of a Chinese family living in Singapore. Initially the boy hates her, but gradually the maid becomes a part of the family. However, the recession blighting the country during the late 1990s is a cloud that looms on the horizon.ILO ILO is very good at putting across a sense of time and place and I particularly enjoyed the backdrop of financial difficulty in which job loss, quiet desperation, and even suicide are themes. What keeps you watching though are the expertly-drawn characters who are brought to life through sparse dialogue. The maid is a thoroughly sympathetic protagonist, but the real delight is child actor Jia Ler Koh; I really appreciate films where you initially hate a character but end up loving them and that's the case here. I'm not a huge fan of art-house cinema but this is a film I can recommend to all.

A film from Singapore that looks deeply into family relationships may not be what we expect, but Anthony Chen's screenplay and direction bring this sensitive little story alive. The time is 1997 (during the Asian Financial Crisis) in Singapore. Jaile Lim is a young boy whose strained home life affects his behavior patterns at school and at play. His parents are overworked and do not cope with Jiale's problems well, and with another baby on the way they hire live in maid and nanny Teresa, a Filipino girl searching for a better life. The friendship between the maid Teresa and young boy Jiale at first causes the mother's jealousy, while the Asian recession hits the region: the bond between Jaile and Teresa actually weakens the strained relationship within the family unit until Teresa manages to calm Jaile's temperament and the result is a an extended family, one that no longer is family and maid. What begins as a strange relationship between a young boy, lonely as his parents are busy making money to support their family, and a maid, who left her young boy to her sister in another country to come to Singapore for earning, becomes a permutation of a true family.The cinematography by Benoit Soler heightens the drama. The acting is high quality – Yann Yan Yeo as the mother, Tianwen Chen, the father, Angeli Bayani as Teresa and Jailer Koh as Jaile. The film is in Mandarin, Tagalog, and Hokkien with English subtitles.

Sincere and heartfelt, this little gem will tug at your heartstrings. This film is director Anthony Chen's debut , but it is executed with such finesse one cannot tell just by watching the film alone. A conscious lack of music allows the acting and characters to really shine--- the former never stilted or cheesy (a common problem in local Singaporean films) ; the latter very believable and connectable. From the retro kitchen tiles to the cassette tapes in Teck's old car, the movie paints a vivid picture of life in the 1990s, without explicitly stating it. The director gives the audience freedom to wander, infer and to truly feel, on their own--not just about time and setting, but also the relationships and nuanced emotions of the characters involved. The camera work also deserves praise as many shots are cleverly done and lighted. The main story is simple, like a home cooked meal. But like a home cooked meal, it is precious and close to the heart.....I found myself laughing but also really close to tears at certain parts. Growing up in 1990s Singapore, many facets of the movie resonated very strongly with me. But at its core it is a universal human story of love and longing, of growing up and painful goodbyes. The movie will creep up on you, sweep you into it, and hit hard on the emotions.

This movie captures the atmosphere of the end of the 90's in Singapore, when an economic tsunami devastated much of Asia, through the memories of a 10-year old.When Antony Chen was looking for a subject for his first feature film, he recorded an event of his childhood that he had since nearly erased from this memory: how he was heartbroken when the Filipino maid who was living with his family had to leave, following his mother's decision to stay at home to tend to the family. From there, vignettes of the past came back to him, that he sought to transcribe them in the movie in the most authentic manner possible.Antony Chen pushed that search for authenticity pretty far, as to find Ko Jia Le (the boy playing the central part), he trawled schools seeing some 2000 boys, interviewing hundreds, and inviting a hundred of them to do workshops. The result was not to take the cutest or the best-looking - something the director wanted to avoid - in fact you often feel ill at ease watching him, playing obsessively with him Tamagochi (remember those?) or making a nuisance of himself in all sorts of ways. You love him and you hate him, was the director's comment, and shooting the movie appears never to have been easy. "There were two children on the set, one in front of the camera, one behind", reminisced Chen. The embarrassment you feel watching him is a compounded by that caused by the tensions between the characters, sometimes so painful and so real that you wonder what you are doing there watching them.The period of the film is, in 2013, highly unusual: nobody to my knowledge has yet set an entire film in the 1990's. But none of the usual tricks to show the audience the period: no camera lingering on a period calendar, no newsreels announcing events identifiable with the period. Part of the time you forget about it, and get reminded by an audio cassette or an electronic typewriter.The movie is upheld by a brilliant cast of very eclectic actors. Chen Tian Wen (the father) comes from Singapore TV soap operas, Angeli Bayani is Filipino and worked in the Philippines in theater and in movies. The fact that the mother (Yann Yann Yeo), was really 6-month pregnant during the shooting, adds humanity to a character who would otherwise appear excessively domineering. The art director is French, met by Chen in the London school of cinema. Chen expressed how he had fears that being a westerner he would show a romantic view of Singapore, something like Woody Allen in Paris, which would have gone against his search for authenticity. The shooting does avoid any romanticism but remains highly interesting, occasionally tripping into a dreamlike quality at odds with the rest of the movie.In short, this is a movie like none other.