The Home Song Stories
Directed by Tony Ayres.
The Home Song Stories is the story of a Chinese man looking back at his Australian childhood. Through this man's memories, we become acquainted with his explosive mother, Rose (played by Joan Chen, whom you might remember as Josie Packard in Twin Peaks). Rose is a Shanghai nightclub singer who migrates to Australia in the sixties on the arm of sailor, and with her two children in tow. From here in unfolds a quest for survival in an alien land, which is made all the more difficult by Rose's volatility. Rose relies on her partners for shelter, and her sexual desirability as a woman is often all that keeps herself and her children from the streets.
As the film opens we learn that Rose left her husband after only a week's marriage, and this introduces a major theme of the film: abandonment. Rose abandons her lovers one by one, or is abandoned by them, left scrambling for a home for herself and her children. Likewise, the child protagonists — Tom (Joel Lok) and his sister May (Irene Chen) — feel abandoned by their mother as a string of men breeze through their lives. As Rose's actions begin to harm her and splinter her family, we learn of Rose's own abandonment at the hands of her Chinese family, and the irreversible effects of her unwanted first marriage. Behind all of this are Tom and May, whose innocence is prematurely cracked by the need to look after their suicidal mother. And this is played out against a setting of cultural alienation in the migrant-poor Australia of the sixties and seventies.
Joan Chen is at the centre of this movie, and shines in her role as Rose. All other acting is accomplished, including the performance of the very young Joek Lok, who plays Tom — his debut role. Darren Yap plays the older Tom, a writer grappling with the memories of his mother, whom we see briefly at the beginning and end of the film: we never get to know him as a character. I thought the film could have done without his role, which perhaps suggests a link between the memories portrayed and Tony Ayres' own life, but nevertheless felt like superfluous 'framing'.
The Home Song Stories is about a lot of things: migration across borders, cultural alienation, the struggle for love and acceptance, growing up, loss of innocence, trauma and memory. It is a good feature film from a fairly new Australian director.
3.5 / 5 stars
Prithvi Varatharajan
