“It’s not a house, it’s a home,” declares patriarch Daryl Kerrigan in The Castle. It’s a memorable line in a film chockfull of memorable lines that's attained the status of national treasure. However, in the broader sweep of Australian cinema, home is more likely to be a site or dysfunction (e.g. The Last Days of Chez Nous, Muriel’s Wedding, The Boys, Crackers, Radiance, Alexandra’s Project) and/or trauma (e.g. Bad Boy Bubby, Shine, The Goddess of 1967, Swimming Upstream, Beautiful Kate, The Babadook). Moreover, in the two films spotlighted this week, home is depicted as temporary and/or circumstantial.
The Home Song Stories (2007) is a somewhat autobiographical work from writer-director Tony Ayres. It unfolds largely from the point of view of Tom (Joel Lok), whose mother Rose (Joan Chen) meets an Australian sailor (Steven Vidler) in Hong Kong, marries him, and brings Tom and older sister May (Irene Chen, no relation) to Australia. Discontent, Rose has affairs with other men, culminating in a disastrous affair with a younger chef (Qi Yuwu).
The Last Emperor aside—which I haven’t seen in an age, and my memory of which is fuzzy—my greatest exposure to Joan Chen has been in films like On Deadly Ground, Judge Dredd, and Heaven & Earth (another tale of dislocation), where her roles were fairly one-dimensional, and Twin Peaks, a series whose tonal alchemy could make good actors look bad and bad actors look good. Consequently, while I wouldn’t say my expectations were low, I was nonetheless bowled over by her multi-faceted and mature performance in The Home Song Stories, playing a character alternately poised and broken, unlikeable and sympathetic. I also appreciated Lok’s work as the writer-director’s young alter-ego, silently observing and registering the toll of the family’s nomadic lifestyle. Ayres and his cinematographer (Nigel Bluck, Son of a Gun), costume designer Cappi Ireland (Yolngu Boy), and production designer and set decorator (Melinda Doring and Glen W. Johnson, The Sapphires) nicely evoke late 60s, early 70s Victoria, creating settings and spaces that feel authentic and lived-in.
Director Richard Lowenstein (Dogs in Space), DP Andrew de Groot (Beyond Innocence), and the designers on He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (2001) likewise evoke a palpable—sometimes to a queasy fault—sense of time and place. The film follows John (Noah Taylor), a twentysomething writer, across three share-houses in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, as he contends with eccentric housemates of varying stripes and debt collectors baying for his blood.
I had a blast seeing Felafel in theatres back in 2001, bolstered by a great communal viewing experience. I had not read John Birmingham’s source material at the time, nor had I enjoyed/endured the lived experiences of share-housing. Having done both since, and watching the film on the small screen for the first time in 20+ years, I’m more engaged by the moments of mundanity and melancholy than I am by those moments that landed in theatres, such as the cartoonish end of Act One in which pagans and neo-Nazis gather around a burning clothesline singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”.
In his adaptation of Birmingham’s purportedly autobiographical novel, Lowenstein—much like Danny Boyle and John Hodge did in adapting Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting—mainlines the nonlinear, episodic structure of the source text into a linear shape, folding in incidents from the book and imposing a character arc of sorts upon John, as he comes to grips with his ex’s marriage, falls for best friend Sam (Emily Hamilton), and gets published in Penthouse. There are fewer share houses in Lowenstein’s film: three houses compared to the novel’s thirteen, albeit listed as houses 47 to 49, and with more hijinks crammed into each locale. Each house corresponds to an act in the film’s three-act structure, and each house has different quirks leaning into cliches associated with their cities. Brisbane is tropical and cartoonish, complete with cane toad golf in the backyard. Melbourne is wet and grungy, populated by Bolshevik hipsters and crooked cops. Finally, Sydney presents uptight yuppie creatives inhabiting a bright, minimally furnished apartment. Obvious gags all, but visuals, dialogue, and incidents are mirrored with city-specific variations across the three-act structure and state lines. Much of the zaniness is frontloaded in Act One, which imbalances the second and third acts but reflects John’s growing ennui.
Where Rose in The Home Song Stories cannot settle with one partner or in one place due to boredom, discontent, and displacement, John is a passive and bemused onlooker who relocates to evade debt and whenever the proverbial hits the fan. Taylor’s performance, consequently, is droll and measured. In the same year as Felafel, he appeared in small roles in Tomb Raider and Vanilla Sky, pointing to the character actor path he’s successfully forged over the subsequent twenty years. That makes Felafel a rare Taylor lead, and for fans of Australian film it’s a companion piece of sorts to The Year My Voice Broke and The Nostradamus Kid, forming an unofficial trilogy where we watch Taylor go through a rite of passage from teenager to university student to unemployed share-houser.
In
my review of The Last Wave, I mentioned that I don’t need closure from films.
Another thing I don’t need is sympathetic or likeable characters. Having said
that, a certain feeling of monotony—linked to my impatience with their unlikeable characters
and behaviours—crept into both The Home Song Stories and Felafel. In the former,
this creeping is centrifugal, emanating outwardly from Rose as she wreaks havoc
in the lives of her loved ones. In Felafel, the creeping is centripetal,
emanating from the unlikeable gallery of housemates orbiting around creased
everyman John. The ensemble cast is generally fine, but each actor presses
heavily into their assigned quirk or personality type. Of the supporting roles,
Emily Hamilton has the most shading to work with and does strong work as Sam,
though her character undergoes perhaps one contrived emotional turn too many. And
Sophie Lee—a gifted comedienne and an underutilized asset in Australian film
(see the aforementioned The Castle, Muriel’s Wedding, Holy Smoke, and her
romantic lead in Bootmen)—is weaponized effectively in the film's dry third act.