Interview with Tony Ayres

Tony Ayres, the enthusiastic writer/director of Home Song Stories, seems unusually jumping for a weekday breakfast. He speaks at an accelerated pace, as if riding aboard a morning wave of caffeine, or (more likely) simply bursting with ideas and feelings regarding his latest cinematic effort. It comes as no surprise that Ayres has so much to say. After all, Home Song Stories is a film about his own childhood experiences and about a difficult time when, just after his family’s move from China to Australia, his mother’s lifestyle escalated out of control.

“Personally, this was obviously a set of events that shaped my life and profoundly moved me,” he explains happily, obviously now quite used to discussing this difficult past, “As a starting point, as a filmmaker, you have to be affected by your own story. The challenge of making the movie was about taking this profound event, which seems very powerful to me, and turning it into something that would also affect others. I also find it so fascinating how, when you have something that comes from the truth, you can kind of bend the story out of shape. It gives you a bit of tolerance, in terms of the way in which it fits in, because real life doesn’t fit into conventional narrative.”

While certainly not revolutionary, the narrative of Home Song Stories does indeed twist its way through time in an imaginative fashion. This is a chronological collage of memories, viewed through a child’s perspective, but retold and collated by the adult version of that child (based on Ayres himself), who makes fleeting appearances in brief cut-aways and voice-overs. Seen typing the story onto his computer, he is obviously, like Ayres, in search of catharsis. “I was trying to emphasise that the film is being told from later,” Ayres comments, “If there is a theme to the film, it is about a little boy falling out of love with his mother because of her behaviour, and trying to, as an adult, revisit that behaviour and try and find a sense of forgiveness.”

As eager as he is to discuss his mother, Ayres seems taken aback when I steer conversation towards his representation of women. “I think that in terms of her representation there is a truth to her character, which I know to be true because my mother experienced it, but there was definitely no underlying political thesis,” he stresses, “I think that if you want a film to resonate with your audience, you have to find a contradictory truth. If you want to communicate a thesis, you’re better off writing it. I wasn’t making the film as a statement about women, or about the Asian diaspora, or Chinese representations.”

Alive with contradiction, complexity and humanity, Home Song Stories is without question far removed from the predictability of dogmatic cinema. While Ayres still seems weary about accidentally suggesting that his film belongs in such a category, he does add that his film’s very existence reflects a huge shift in attitudes from the 1970s in which it is set. “When the population changes, inevitably more stories like mine will be told, and they will hopefully provide a human face to these diaspora stories,” he suggests, “There will be more stories like Romulus My Father, or Clubland. Those are three stories all about mothers, and all about migrants, and they’ve all come out this year. That’s a reflection of our shifting culture.”

We can only hope that, as our culture continues to shift, it will also continue to reveal more precious tales such as this one, concerned as they are with capturing poignantly subjective memories rather than with pushing trite political agendas. This film makes a perfect addition our ever-expanding treasure trove of recently uncovered Australian stories.

Home Song Stories

As the AFI awards draw ever closer, Australian films begin attracting more and more attention to themselves, and the latest horse out of the gates is Home Song Stories. Based upon the true childhood experiences of writer/director Tony Ayres, this film is essentially comprised of the memories of Tom (Joel Lok), who, as a young boy, found himself growing increasingly disenchanted by his unstable, slowly disintegrating mother, Rose. Brought to life by the formidable Chinese starlet Joan Chen (best known to Westerners as Josie from Twin Peaks), Rose is a veritable fire-cracker of a woman, shifting violently through partners and plans, exploding without warning and dragging the torn remnants of her family behind her. She is utterly unsympathetic, but also completely intoxicating, enlivening the film with her fiery temperament.

Ayres’ attention to detail in this film is nothing short of sublime. Reconstructed from his personal photo collection, the set and costume design instantly draw audiences into his 1960s reality. The soundscape is equally fascinating, with every background sound, from the slightest bird chirp to the loudest car engine, clearly polished to perfection. Ayres himself has commented upon how the sound detail was designed to reflect the way in which memories capture only particular sounds, while entirely disregarding others, and, once you notice this, it is extremely effective. The narrative core, however, is not quite as imaginative, and, though it may seem facile to say this about a true story, rather repetitive. Ayres’ use of flashbacks and dream sequences does little to revive the story’s flavour, and in fact seem rather at odds with the rest of the film’s style. Nonetheless, Ayres’ ability to cloak the entire film in an appropriately childish honesty is commendable, and does provide a layer of complex contradiction which cancels out the story’s tendency to lag. Furthermore, Chen alone is a pleasure to watch, as she maintains the film’s energy levels throughout and vigorously drives the narrative towards its powerful conclusion.

Rating: 8.6