A still from How to Make Millions
Before Grandma Dies
This is a film that explores ethnicity in
Bangkok in a quiet and mostly gentle way.
It’s not set among the great palaces and temples but largely in the domestic and the suburban over on the western side across the Chaya Phraya river in Talat Phlu. ‘
A young man, M (Putthipong Assaratanakul), has dropped out of study and seems to be perpetually gaming on line. His mother struggles to provide for them both. M starts to eye his grandmother’s failing health and the possibility of inheriting from her.
He looks to his cousin, Mui, who seems to find looking after her dying grandfather a straightforwardly easy job. She subsequently inherits his house. He inveigles his way into the grandma’s life. She is no fool, however, and pulls him into her congee making business.
Actually they get on well and increasingly better. Which is just as well as the cancer that will kill her becomes worse and the treatment more expensive.
One of her sons is financially useless. Another has prospered but doesn’t help. And an appeal to her rich brother comes crashing up against Chinese cultural attitudes to women; she left the family to marry and changed her name. He has no obligation.
The poverty, the Chinese shrines, the cluttered little houses of the Bangkok suburbs, but always with lots of plants and the carefully nurtured pomegranates is all carefully observed.
it’s a film that starts with a Chinese cemetery and ends with one. In between Mui’s grandfather is cremated, with paper houses and goods thrown into the flames. Is that Buddhist and Chinese practice mixed together? But M and his closest relatives will follow the Chinese custom and the film ends as it began, in a Chinese burial ground.
Putthipong Assaratanakul’s M and dying grandmother Ahmah (Usha Seamkhum in her first film) give deeply felt and understated performances. It’s no wonder that this film has touched the hearts of many across Asia for whom the mingling of Chinese with local culture is a strong part of who they are.
