As a memoir of unstable family and difficult times in cross-cultural 60/70s Australia, The Home Song Stories is a personal and affecting account of a Chinese boy growing up both because of, and despite the strains of family.

A singer in a Hong Kong nightclub, beautiful Chinese-mother-of-two Rose (Joan Chen), and her accompanying feminine wiles, are spotted by Australian navyman Bill (Steven Vidler), a humble, at-heart suburban type who, almost immediately, marries her and whisks her and her children, Tom (Darren Yap) and May (Irene Chen), back to Skippy’s backyard to start a new family life in Melbourne.

Which seems to last all of five minutes, as Rose subsequently whisks the kids off to Sydney, using her newfound Australian resident status and undeniable good looks to try and secure a better man, a better life, and all the comforts a nominal kind of upward mobility can bring. Things, as they tend to, don’t work out, and the family end up moving back to Melbourne and back to Bill (whose continuing level of forgiveness in this film would be hard to believe if it weren’t infact based on reality). Rose, however, is as unstable and unfaithful as ever, as intent on undermining the family’s ability to become truly settled and integrated, as she is on (selfishly) bettering their circumstances. The family suffers and things move closer to breaking point as the teenage May grows nearer to her mother’s latest provider and loverboy, Joe (Qi Yuwu).

The film, an admittedly close semi-autobiographical take on director Tony Ayres’s own Australian childhood, is ostensibly a mixture of family melodrama, cross-cultural coming of age story, and, given perspective primarily through Tom, a character piece of a woman who is conflicted by her obligations and her own wishes, a constant source of both love and disappointment to those around her.

And Rose is a fantastic, tragic and justifiable centrepoint for a film, a woman who can be challenged, admired, hated, and certainly remembered; a woman who survives both opportunistically and necessarily off the backs of whatever man will provide for her (and her children) as a kept woman. A mother who is also depressive, suicidal, and too unstable to ever provide more than a fleeting sense of the family life and settled integration into Australian community that her children desperately need.

Joan Chen’s performance here is magnificent - a heady mix of confusion, indulgence, selfishness, and a genuine sense of longing to provide the stability and love her family needs. The movie centers on, and succeeds primarily because of her ability to communicate in subtle and fully realised ways someone who is ambitious, complicated, confused; someone who isn’t the reductive villain or tragic figure of the piece, but a character who is very real, conflicted, struggling, failing, and still capable of provoking empathy, concern and love from an audience.

As a film and a piece of largely personal material to the filmmaker, The Home Song Stories is in most senses a significant local success. The look of the film is beautiful, and Ayres has been successful in creating an intimate feel and a well founded sense of time to the story. As a piece of autobiographical storytelling, the material seems to be a real catharsis of sorts: honest, emotionally complicated and unflinching in what it presents.

The film pitches itself as a ‘true Australian story,’ and it is just that - a story centred around immigrants that is personal and relevant to the Australian experience, and the universal experience of growing up, but which doesn’t engage into the kind of broad experiential set pieces that many cross-cultural, struggling to fit in, homeland tales dish up. Here, home is more relevant to the ability of Tom’s family to be just that, for each of them to succeed in being a mother, a son, and a daughter, often beyond their own ages and emotional capabilities, and you feel like this would be the case no matter where they were in the world.

The consideration with autobiography, though, is that to some extent, a filmmaker may who is so closely involved with the translation of a personal story to the production of a film (here Ayres is writer and director), may lose sight of how material and structure translates to an audience. It’s unfortunate that Ayres felt the need to bookend the film with his onscreen stand-in’s adult narration, and specifically to end the film circling his contented, thoughtful state regarding his whole childhood. The story that is here is certainly strong enough to simply present in and of itself, and would have been that much more successful had it the courage to simply present itself detached from any explicit contrivance of memoir, as a story only unfolding in the time and space its characters inhabit.

To present and remove, and then present again the author at a distance from the story he is telling allows a happier ending, but also strains the connection to the story the audience may have felt throughout, and for me, cheapens the whole deal conclusively. As a viewer, I haven’t seen, or felt any sympathy or connection with the adult version of Tom throughout the film; his entry into the story is more of an intrusion, for the sake of an up ending, and a superfluous device to balance the resonance of his childhood experiences against the childhood the film presents. To some, however, the device will be favoured, allowing a positive resolution and happy ending as it does.

Despite this debatable structuring device, The Home Song Stories remains a high quality local production, providing layered, human drama with a personal story; one which is expertly carried and realised in Joan Chen’s performance, and in the film’s ability to balance tragedy, comedy and drama to a satisfying outcome.

Review by Avril Carruthers

Cast: Joan Chen, Irene Chen, John Lok, Yuwu Walker, Gabrielle Chan, Pearl Tan, Haven Tso, Steven Vidley
Director: Tony Ayres
Screenplay: Tony Ayres
Australian theatrical release date: August 23 , 2007