HATRED flashes across the face of Shanghai nightclub singer Rose Hong as she contemplates the prospect her teenage daughter has engaged in a steamy affair with her lover.
Plagued by depression and consumed with anger, the stunning performer turns on the innocent child, as her younger son watches. While such a story may be swept under the carpet by most of us confronted with a troubled and harrowing childhood, Australian writer and director Tony Ayres's mission was to bring it to life in The Home Song Stories.
Initially set in the 1960s, the film, mostly shot in Melbourne, explores the tragic story of migrant single mother Rose, played by Chinese actress Joan Chen, her daughter May (Irene Chen) and son Tom (Joel Lok), as they struggle to survive in Australia.
Based on Ayres's own life, The Home Song Stories begins in China, with Hong meeting Bill (Steven Vidler), an Australian sailor, whom she marries and accompanies to Victoria in order to start a new life.
However the fairytale is short-lived and Hong and her two children move to Sydney, while Bill continues sailing around the globe.
Hong quickly finds comfort in the arms of younger lover Joe (Qi Yuwu), but again sees her happiness destroyed when the Chinese cook cracks under the strain of a relationship with a manic middle-aged woman with baggage. It is then that Joe turns his attention to May, and the pair form a close friendship that an insecure Hong misunderstands for romance, sending the mother and daughter into the depths of despair.
During a whirlwind Sydney promotional tour of the film, Chen reveals it was the complexity of portraying Rose Hong that appealed to her.
"She is complex and this bigger, larger-than-life drama queen and that's the fun of getting to play her," smiles the 46-year-old. "There are real issues she had to deal with and go through, and there are parts I could relate to.
"I have a manic side in me, it's just well-monitored. She is without a monitor.
We all have times we can go crazy and I just tapped into that."
And Chen, a mother of two, was also able to draw from the well of exhaustion and frustrations that come with being a parent.
"We are from two totally different worlds, but you can always understand," she says. "I think all mothers question themselves. That's natural in motherhood, I think, and there are moments you are exhausted, you just have had enough and you treat your children inconsistently sometimes. You get mad at them for no good reason, and then you love them, hug them and shower them with gifts for no good reason. I am not impulsive like (Rose), but I understood her."
The Twin Peaks actress, who is regarded as one of China's most successful stars, has been based in the US for 25 years, but still spends a few months each year in Shanghai, where she was born.
It has been a steady rise to the top for Chen, who landed her first major role as a deaf mute in the 1977 film Youth and became famous three years later for her performance in The Little Flower, the film earning her China's best actress award and making her a star.
Now her resume boasts more than 50 US and Chinese film credits.
Chen says she was instantly interested in The Home Song Stories, but she was wary about participating in such a dark film.
"I had some trouble," she admits.
"I knew I wanted to play her because she was so varied, so rich, but I did worry about her being so sympathetic.
"The first script I read, there was relief when she wasn't around any more.
The sun finally comes out and there is not that cloud hanging over everyone.
I thought, 'How can I play a character like that?' I tried to keep pushing Tony to find something a bit more redemptive for her."
The actress also feared Ayres was too close to the subject.
"When I met him he was obsessed. There was this obsession about his mother and to understand why, and why he wanted to write about his mother, I had to talk for a long time to him," Chen says.
"Are we supposed to hate her? Love her? We talked at length about this and, of course, to play the character, you want her to be sympathetic and she wasn't initially.
So I had to know from Tony what exactly drove him to write about his mother again, again and again. I think making the film was therapeutic for him in the end."
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