The Home Song Stories: 103 minutes. Rated: M. Director: Tony Ayres. Starring: Joan Chen, Yuwu Qi, Joel Lok, Irene Chen, Steven Vidler, Kerry Walker, website
To say Melbourne writer/director Tony Ayres’ new film is a personal project would be an understatement. But while The Home Song Stories draws heavily upon true events from Ayres’ own childhood, this is not, he insists, the intimate self-portrait it may first appear to be.
“It’s a fictional film based on true events,” Ayres clarifies. “Even though everything actually happened, I had to fill in a lot of gaps, and make suppositions.”
“The film was a constant tussle between the unwieldiness of real life, and my attempts to shape it into a dramatic film,” he adds. “At the end of the day I had to separate myself from the pictures in my head, regard the characters as characters in their own right, and make them understandable and coherent in their own terms.”
The film centres on Ayres’ mother Rose (Joan Chen), a Chinese nightclub singer who follows Aussie sailor Bill (Vidler) to Melbourne in 1964, with young Tom (Ayres’ alter-ego, played by Lok) and his older sister, May (Irene Chen) in tow.
Rose is a self-centred, even emotionally abusive character, who leaves Bill after a week of marriage, then returns seven years later to attempt to reconcile, only to commence an affair with a charismatic (and younger) Chinese immigrant, Joe (Qi).
The film is jarringly episodic, but unfolds with a certain emotional rawness, focusing particularly on the impact Rose’s destructive behaviour has on her children. When Joe starts to show an interest in the blossoming and beautiful May, it triggers a string of devastating events with an inevitably tragic outcome.
“What’s weird is that people expect that making the movie was a cathartic experience for me,” says Ayres. “But to be honest, I don’t feel that.”
“Having lived through it, and told the story to people, I know it’s an extraordinary series of events—if I’d been told this story by someone else I would have thought, [I’d like to] turn it into a film. It’s based on my childhood, but in making it I had to distance myself. In lots of ways those issues aren’t burning issues for me.
“Having said that, I wouldn’t have made it unless those issues affected me and unless I felt a need to tell that story. But the story doesn’t necessarily