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(smartshanghai.com)
Updated: 2008-05-12 15:07

Leo Tolstoy once said, "Every unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way." In Tony Ayres' Home Song Stories(2007), we are given a family that is unhappy in every conceivable way.

The story is Chinese-Australian writer/director Ayres' thinly veiled autobiography -- the writing of which of is his attempt to come to terms his mother Rose's (played by the always dynamic Joan Chen) destructive lifestyle and choices. By the time we meet Rose in the late '60s, she's at the end of her run as a Shanghainese nightclub singer and commencing her descent into the (predictably disastrous) life of booze, pills, and men.　　

Rose moves herself and her two children to Australia to marry "Uncle Bill" (Steven Vider) an unassuming, kindly naval officer who she deserts almost immediately. Seven years and numerous "uncles" later, Rose, May (Irene Chen), and Tom (Joel Lok) return to Bill desperate and empty-handed. This time, Bill leaves the family alone with his racist hag of a mother (Kerry Walker) and Rose takes up with handsome Chinese cook Joe (Qi Yuwu) in a pathos-driven attempt to recapture her youth. As the years pass Rose watches her looks dwindle and her addiction to alcohol intensify. Young May's beauty rapidly supplants her mother's, which in turn wins her the attentions of Joe. Tom, the young writer, looks on for the most part, watching the drama unfold between his mother and sister, steering clear of the household's instability.

Home Song Stories is, overall, a really engrossing story, but has the tendency to dip into melodrama -- especially during the latter third of the story, which forces us to accompany Rose to the emergency room in her series of suicide attempts. Ayres paints a tragic portrait of Australian suburbia as a wasteland that strips Rose of her former nightclub glamour, putting her to work in the back of a Chinese restaurant scrubbing pots. Working with themes of Chinese diaspora gracefully, Ayres creates some long-lasting and effective tragic imagery with his gentle symbolism of Rose's silk cheongsams fluttering wistfully in the backyard breeze of a ramshackle existence.

Perhaps Home Song Stories is not a unique story, but it's powerfully rendered and the we can assume that writer Tony Ayres experienced catharsis in its telling -- his only stated intention. Grade: B+!