The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison enthuses over HOW TO MAKE MILLIONS BEFORE GRANDMA DIES (Pat Boonnitipat, Thailand, 2024)

The new Thai film Lahn Mah/How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is currently a box office leader in Asia. It is exactly the kind of product SBS’s Founding Fathers (& Mothers) had in mind, something to make migrant voters remember them on polling day, with the added fringe benefit of making those seem less alien to the wider population still mulling over multi-culturalism. I remember the politico who cheerily explained that it wasn’t there for punters who were too mean to lay out the cost of a foreign movie. 

Well currently SBS is airing Austin Powers Man of Mystery and Olivier’s Hamlet - time off for the subtitling unit. Can’t help but think that other outlets could meet that need without troubling the tax payer.

I came at How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies pretty much unprepared - minimal advance publicity and reviews in Chinese. Also my tolerance for films that give off feel good vibrations is limited. It took me a while to get into this one. 

Twenty-something Putthipong Assaratanakul is trying to monetise the family computer without much success. His sexy cousin Tontawan Tantivejakul is onto a better number nursing her grandfather through the last stages of a fatal illness, with an eye on the family inheritance. Cut from the delighted invalid’s TV showing a parade of fashion models to a line of white-robed monks at the old man’s funeral. Tantivejakul’s coming out of that manoeuvre with a house.

Assaratanakul hasn’t taken much notice of Usha Seamkhum, his isolated granny. He waits downstairs while his parents make one of their duty flying visits. Hey, didn’t we see that last week in the Spanish Casa en flames? Is this universal human behavior or do these guys watch one another’s movies?

Her scans reveal that the old woman has stage four cancer and he’s warned not to tell her. The bulb lights up. He gathers his things and moves in to tend to Seamkhum’s final days. This takes a sizeable adjustment for both of them, with him having to give the octogenarian sponge baths and rise at five AM to assist on her congee stall. Complications develop with his parents and waster uncle revealed with the surprise sympathy that the film manages to find for most of it’s characters. The inheritance plan and the character trajectories laid out prove unreliable. Only Seamkhum’s brother, who prospered from their family inheritance and is serving a luxury buffet when she brings her grandson to see him, proves contemptible. “Don’t come again.”

The film manages the tightrope between saccharine and cynical with remarkable skill. Even the upbeat ending is made acceptable when we see it has been set up - the silver belt gift, Seamkhum’s afterlife plan. The one departure from realism, the Miss Julie pan to the characters young, is where it should be to have an effect.

My feeling that I was being presented with an exotic soap opera evaporated under the impact of skilful filmcraft. The city we see is not familiar and brought to life by the people we get to know attempting to create a good life. Particularly the open-air train becomes a motif, (telling shot of Seamkhum’s reflection on its window after the grim news) along with the alleyway shop-home contrasted to suburban comfort, the shoe warehouse, the community pool, the crowded hospital waiting room, the street market, where gran’s friend is also condemned by cancer - all more plausible in soft colour and unfamiliar groupings. It is hard to resist the final drive past the places picked out earlier and now signalled by announcements rapped on the coffin.

The creatives are not established, with the director having done some episode TV and Usha Seamkhum’s long experience confined to commercials. There is some overlap with Bad Genius (Nattawut Poonpiriya,Thailand, 2017) where Sarinrat Thomas, who plays the lead’s mother (a nice piece of writing & performance) was the headmistress.

This is not an impenetrable festival piece like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. A Saturday run, at the Event Centre, was well attended. I would have been surprised to see as many people downstairs at Twisters.