Ilo Ilo tells a story of a maid, Terry joining a family. Hwee Leng wants to hire a maid to lighten her household burden at home.
The kid in the house -Jiale, refuses to accept Terry in his life. The tension between Jiale and Terry is almost like typical Korean love story. It starts from rejecting, to fighting each other, to making friends, then to departing. Jiale accepts Terry more than he accepts his mom.
The film raises up a lot of local issues. It touches heavily on financial crisis, on the family side, as well as the maid. Teck loses his job, and money after his stock is having bear market. Terry wants to earn money to support her family in Philippines. Besides that, it touches lightly on traffic accident, public canning, family reunion, committing suicide and attending motivational talk. All these are closely related to local culture.
We start to enjoy the film when we see the smart part of each character. Terry begins to earns more income by helping out in a barber shop during her off day once a month. She also keeps secret for Teck that he is smoking outside the apartment. We see that Jiale is rebellion, but he is determined to study lottery. Eventually, he got his teacher to strike a grand prize.
The film is down to earth, as we see the downside of each character. Teck loses his job and money after he wants to start his own business with his friends. Hwee Leng loses money as well after attending motivational talk. Terry drops her bamboo stick over the balcony while doing her laundry. Surprisingly, Jiale doesn't win the lottery even though he tries very hard to make Terry to stay in the family.
The story is almost similar with A Simple Life (2011). Anthony Chen has brought us the process of having the maid in the family being the main ingredient of the whole thing. Heart warming.
