Coming after Ilo Ilo won the Camera d'Or for Best First Film at
the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it has put both
writer-director Anthony Chen and his drama in Singapore history
books as the country's most internationally lauded auteur and film,
two products of Singapore pitted against the best in the world, and
winning.
Chen likes to call Ilo Ilo, a drama about a Singapore family
struggling to adapt to their new domestic helper in the midst of
the 1998 economic slump, his "little film".
This "little film", shot around Jurong and other housing estates on
a budget of $500,000, is not just an award winner. It is also doing
tidy business at box offices overseas, especially in film-mad
France.
The film's modest financial gains, when seen against its plaudits
for artistic achievement, point to several interesting new trends
in Singapore cinema.
First, while the film might be partly funded by the Singapore Film
Commission and Ngee Ann Polytechnic and feature the vision of a
Singaporean film-maker, it is, under the surface, an international
work.
It features two foreign-born leads - a Malaysian-born actress (Yeo
Yann Yann, winner of Best Supporting Actress award at the Golden
Horse) and Filipino actress Angela Bayani.
The director of photography, Benoit Soler, is a Frenchman.
The film's languages switch from English to Mandarin to Cantonese
to Tagalog, and its main theme - about how an average family adapts
to life with a foreign domestic helper - is one that people in
Taiwan (where many households employ Filipino helpers) and France
can identify with.
More telling is what it does not have. It relies very little on
factors that local films employ for marketability in Singapore.
It does not feature cute young actors. There is no romantic angle,
slapstick humour, horror elements or computer- added special
effects. It lacks stock characters that rely on familiarity with
local television or local institutions.
These traits that sell a movie in this country and, increasingly,
Malaysia, have the reverse effect on overseas box-office
takings.
Ilo Ilo made just under a million at the Singapore box office, a
far cry from the over $6 million that each of the two Ah Boys To
Men army comedy films made this year and last year.
But these works, and the other horror and romantic comedy films
that form the bulk of local output, do not travel well.
What's also troubling is that Ilo Ilo is not some esoteric arthouse
production. It was aimed squarely at the middle.
As Chen himself said as he took the trophy for Best Original
Screenplay on Saturday night: "The commercial movie people told me
it wouldn't sell. The arthouse people said that no film festival
will want it."
So while we might all celebrate the Singapore movie that has gone
further than any before it, the film is also a signal. It shows
that the gap between what Singaporeans want to see, and what wins
audiences and awards overseas, remains stubbornly wide.
http://www.stasiareport.com/the-big-story/asia-report/singapore/story/success-spores-little-film-shows-difference-between-spore-
