It’s been a while between drinks for Australian filmmaker Tony Ayres. He follows up his 2002 AIDS-based melodrama Walking On Water with a heart-felt and deeply personal family drama. His alter-ego Tom recounts the year his life changed, the year his sparkling mother Rose (a radiant Joan Chen) runs out of financial and emotional options. Hoping to reconcile with her one-time Ango lover Bill, the former nightclub singer shifts her children from Shanghai to the drab suburbs of 1960’s Melbourne. Her arrival stirs wary locals like a peacock would upset a cage full of sparrows. Bill’s mother is particularly unimpressed, no more so than when unsuitable Rose takes a young Chinese lover in her husband’s absence. It triggers another series of moves as the unstable woman pushes her children from home to home, severe mood swings jumping between good-time pal and that of a frightening, suicidal matriarch. What she demands of her seven year old son and his sister is simply monstrous.

Although Ayres’ compelling story of migration, displacement and mental illness is universal, especially so in an Australian context, it is one seldom told. His sense of time and place is immaculate, his visual imagery sumptuous yet distressing in its authenticity. Chen turns in one of her best performances and her on-screen family – newcomers Joel Lok and Irene Chen – are effortless. But for all the film’s strengths, Ayres’ wobbly screenplay eventually undermines his decisive direction. He lingers with minor detail and a cyclic, wandering tone eventually falters after one too many trips to the casualty ward. He is more eloquent when his view is less subjective; a shot of his proud, high-healed, neon-clad mother passing beige shop fronts like the alien she was speaks volumes.

Coupled with a devastating ending, The Home Song Stories is blessed by that rare capacity to haunt long after leaving the final reel.

// COLIN FRASER