Peter Bradshaw reviews Ilo Ilo
When Anthony Chen was a child in Singapore, his parents employed a Filipina nanny. Generally speaking, he says, the relationship between such maids and employers is "quite brutal. You invite a stranger into your home and have them form a relationship with your children over a number of years. Then when you decide you don't need help any more, you send them home, and that sense of family is very brutally erased."
Instead of erasing his own nanny, Chen made a film about her. And it isn't brutal at all. Ilo Ilo, which won the Camera D'Or award [for best debut feature] at last year's Cannes film festival, is a sensitive, observant study of a Singaporean family under pressure, and their new Filpina domestic help, who's under even more pressure. It is set in 1997, around the time Chen was just saying goodbye to his nanny, who had been part of the family for eight years. The character in the film has the same name: Teresa, or "Aunty Terry", as Chen called her, and Ilo Ilo is the province of the Philippines where she came from and returned to. In the film, Aunty Terry's treatment is somewhat harsher than in reality, Chen stresses. She sleeps on a roll-out bed in the same room as the vindictive little brat of a boy she's charged with looking after. And when she's not being stitched up by him, there are the domestic chores, the cold, imperious mother, the father pushed to the brink by the Asian economic crisis, and her guilt over her own son, growing up without a mother back in the Philippines. Mary Poppins it ain't.
Continue reading...Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/01/ilo-ilo-director-anthony-chen-interview
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