OTIPS-CHENZHIJIAN

http://www.homesongstories.com/

由澳洲华人Tony Ayres编剧并导演的电影《家庭故事》(Home Song Stories)将于8月23日起在澳洲各地公映。

《家庭故事》富有浓厚的中国风情。场景从上海、香港转换到墨尔本，陈冲在剧中以英语、普通话和广东话演绎。蔡琴低沉的《忘不了》歌声贯穿始终，剧情起伏跌宕，人物刻画感人至深。

How far do you have to journey to find your home?

http://www.smh.com.au/news/film-reviews/the-home-song-stories/2007/08/17/1186857747075.html

A Chinese immigrant finds discontentment in suburbia

Genre

Drama

Run Time

103 minutes

Rated

M

Country

Australia

Director

Tony Ayres

Actors

Darren Yap, Joan Chen, Steven Vidler, Kerry Walker, William Tang, Joel Lok, Guang Qiao Feng, Irene Chen

Rating

stars-4

The only currency Rose (Joan Chen) possesses is her beauty - an asset offering diminishing returns, as she herself is only too well aware. In her view, an old woman is as useless as a dog with three legs. So with that thought in mind, she cuts her losses and abandons the uncertainties of life as a nightclub singer in Shanghai to parachute into what she hopes will be the safety of marriage.

It's a rash decision because it lands her in the suburban flatlands of 1960s Melbourne, looking like some exotic bird suddenly deprived of the power of flight.

Rose is an emblematic figure, standing in for many of the migrants who have found themselves adrift in the sleepy expanses of Australian suburbia after a life of bustle and speed in the cities of Europe and Asia. In creating her, The Home Song Stories writer-director Tony Ayres also had somebody specific in mind: his own Chinese-born mother. The Home Song Stories is his tribute to her, a portrait etched in equal measures of love and exasperation.

At best, Rose is an unpredictable parent. When we catch up with her in Melbourne, by the way, she hasn't quite folded up her wings. On discovering that her new husband, Bill (Steven Vidler), an Australian sailor, is going to be at sea for months at a time, she dumps him and takes off again, this time for Sydney. And her children, May and Tom, find themselves having to get to know yet another succession of "uncles", Rose's euphemism for the men who have lent her their protection for brief periods of her chancy existence.

Dressed in a cheongsam slit to the thigh, Chen gives Rose a dynamism that won't be denied. She's like a heat-seeking missile, although the heat she's after is not the kind to be found amid the baking brick and tile of summer in suburbia. For this is where she finds herself once more after sailor Bill unwisely takes her back.

When he leaves her again to return to his ship, she broods for a bit. Then she looks for solace, becoming a regular at the local Chinese restaurant. Here she can chat in Cantonese, sample the food she loves, reminisce about the city she's left behind and get away from the flinty stare of Kerry Walker, who's enjoying herself hugely in the role of her misanthropic mother-in-law.

Our own view of Rose is filtered through the eyes of her young son, Tom, a character based on Ayres himself. The years of learning how to handle his wayward mother have armed him with a deceptively matter-of-fact manner.