Ilo-Ilo 爸媽不在家 – Review

These days, political debates about the effect of immigration on Singapore’s demographics and culture are rife. This tiny little island city is teeming with life almost too much life, one might think, as we mingle every day with more and more people whose accents, national identities and family histories are quite unlike our own. After winning the prestigious Camera d’Or for best debut feature film in the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Anthony Chen’s Ilo-Ilo returns home to put a very human face on an issue that tends to reduce people to statistics.

Hwee Leng (Yeo) and Boon Teck (Chen), parents of mischievous scamp Jiale (Koh), are about to welcome a new member into the family. It’s not a little baby brother or sister for Jiale, however or, at least, not just yet. The newest addition to their dinner table is Teresa Auntie Terry (Bayani) a Filipino maid who arrives in Singapore to keep house for a family that isn’t her own. At first, Jiale bristles at this unfamiliar presence in his world. But, after a few scrapes and scuffles, he forms a unique bond with Terry that only adds to the troubles of his stressed, tired mother.

At pretty much every step along the way, Chen could have resorted to convention and stereotype to tell his story. Imagine the dramatic potential in a film about a nanny who arrives just when the sad, neglected children in a broken family unit need her the most. Simply dial her personality up and you could get the Singaporean version of Mary Poppins; dial it down and you’d have The Sound Of Music.

But Chen has no truck with fairy-tales or exercises in wish-fulfilment, and his film is all the better for it. One of the greatest joys of Ilo-Ilo is how very real, grounded and down-to-earth it is. The quartet of characters at the film’s huge, beating heart aren’t blown up and out of all proportion. Terry is neither martyr nor saint, and Hwee Leng isn’t simply an evil, negligent monster of a mother who is too busy with her career to notice that her child is growing away from her.


Instead, Chen takes his time in adding layers and colouring shades of complexity into the entire extended family. In the process, he gifts us with four fully-fledged individuals in whom we will all recognise some aspect of ourselves from the slightly hen-pecked Boon Teck, trying desperately to provide for his family in a failing economy; to the prickly, warm-hearted Jiale who annoys and charms everyone around him in equal measure.

Chen sketches the delicate web of relationships within the family in a way that doesn’t force a moral or preachy sentiment down the audience’s throats. The uneasy relationship between Hwee Leng and Terry harried mother and surrogate care-taker is handled with particular delicacy, with neither character glorified nor demonised over the other. Chen also takes time to explore Hwee Leng and Boon Teck’s seemingly fraying marriage, stretched thin by the burden of a hell-raising son and an unforgiving economy, but one that’s nevertheless underscored by a deep mutual love and commitment.

Truth be told, Chen’s film would not be half as effective as it is without his phenomenal cast. Chen Tianwen and Bayani are both instrumental to their director’s attempt to tell a credible, powerful story, while Koh (making his onscreen debut) is a preternaturally gifted young actor who never comes across as too cute or too fake. Good as they all are, however, it is the heavily-pregnant-in-real-life Yeo who acts as the glue holding the entire film together. As a character, Hwee Leng can be frustrating and difficult to like. However, in Yeo’s capable hands, her concerns about Terry’s growing influence in Jiale’s life are not so much paranoid as they are heartbreaking.

Is Chen’s film perfect? Not quite. Its story is told in short, episodic bursts, and although everything weaves together very well by the end, the structure could prove frustrating and even boring for some. Much as one of Ilo-Ilo‘s strengths lies in its refusal to over-dramatise events, Chen runs the occasional risk of having his film sink beneath the tedium of the everyday.

Those are minor quibbles, however. In almost every respect, Chen’s thoughtful, sensitive film is an easy one to be proud of. It serves both as a snapshot of the times (its recreation of the dreary economic doldrums of the mid-1990s is depressingly realistic), and as a reflection on society today asking subtle but utterly relevant questions about what makes a family, and how notions of integration and assimilation can affect us in a day-to-day, visceral fashion. In a cinematic landscape crowded almost exclusively with brainless comedies or schlocky horror movies, Ilo-Ilo serves as welcome proof that there are great, powerful, relevant stories to be told about Singapore and the people all the people who live in it.

Summary: A film that Singaporeans can be proud to call their own.

RATING: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Shawne Wang