Review of "Home Song Story"

The title may not inspire, but The Home Song Stories is a wonderfully moving personal reflection of a boy’s life with his demanding, manipulative and captivating mother. Tony Ayres, who won much acclaim for his 2002 film Walking on Water, takes the bold step of pointing the camera at his own childhood. Ayres came to Australia in 1964 with his older sister and mother, and it is the story of their life in Melbourne in the early 1970’s that lies at the heart of this film.

The story opens in a lush and smoky Shanghai nightclub where Rose (Joan Chen) sings with sensual and translucent beauty. But we quickly discover the pattern of Rose’s life, shifting between various “uncles” with whom she trades her charisma, stunning looks and presumably her bed, for financial support. After meeting an Australian sailor, Bill (Steven Vidler), she brings her son Tom (Joel Lok) and daughter May (Irene Chen) to Melbourne to get married. But Rose cannot escape her tragic disposition, and the cycle of moving house and moving uncles continues in this foreign land until, with her looks beginning to fade, she finds herself living in almost pitiful conditions with a much younger man, Joe (Yuwu Qi), a chef in a small Chinese restaurant, and an illegal immigrant in Australia.

Rose wanders the predominantly Anglo-Australian suburbs in revealing cheongsams. She smokes elegantly and convinces the local Chinese community that she was once a star. She tickles and coaxes her children, and makes noodles for Joe. But there is a fatalistic brittleness in everything she does, and in an instant she can turn tiger, savaging her lover, her daughter, and putting down all those around her with an ugly contempt. Watching all of these moments is the eleven-year-old Tom, unsure of what to do or say, unable to comprehend this kind of person, this form of love – this mother.

The film belongs to Joan Chen, and it’s worth seeing it for her performance alone. Rose is a complex woman: resourceful, manipulative and explosive, yet fragile and frequently remorseful. It would be easy to lose the character to melodrama, or take refuge with safe choices. Yet Chen is both daring and understanding, layering the beautiful and dangerous woman she plays with intricacies borne from a secret past, one that is revealed late in the film with a flashback of Rose’s life as a young woman in China. Chen has never been better than this.

Director Ayres brings a painterly and measured eye to the film and carefully manages to steer away from portraying his mother with sentimentality, except in the flashback scene, which is tinged with an exotic nostalgia – perhaps because it is a story told by Rose herself. Ayres extracts strong performances from the two youngsters, both in debut roles, and Qi too brings depth and intensity to the young lover Joe, excited at being with Rose yet driven to desperation at her increasingly demanding behaviour.

Strangely, Ayres chooses to include some dream sequences of the young Tom’s fantasies of being a mythological Chinese hero - the kind he reads about in comic books. He flies through the air fighting off the evil forces in his life – and although we understand why he would want to live in this fantasy world, these sequences fit rather uncomfortably in an otherwise carefully designed and photographed film. The voice-over too – from the writer that the young Tom presumably becomes - is also unnecessary at times. Joan Chen’s brilliant performance is enough to show us the difficulties her son was witness to, and the complex emotional memories that would have resulted.