Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s debut film Last Train Home is a feature documentary heroically depicting an unfathomable immensity by intimately focusing on the story of a single family caught in the largest mass migration on earth. Opening overhead shots show a huge mob waiting in the Guangzhou Train Station to push their way into their annual New Year’s journey home – a cultural spectacle made by 130 million some migrant urban workers in modern China. Fan then picks up on the struggle waged by the Zhangs, a married couple working together in a Guangzhou garment factory as sewing-machine operators, to reunite with their teenage children in a Sichuan village 1,300 miles away. Within no time, the film artistically establishes its motif of one migrant worker’s family’s struggle viewed as microcosm for the macrocosm of a rapidly modernizing China, a country marching towards accelerated economic development and global economic dominance at the expense of losing many of its traditional ways and values. Tense or intense, credible or incredible, Fan’s superbly realized docudrama reaches the audience with an unflinching eye for the seeable and a compassionate heart for unseeable.
The film opens in the winter of 2006 in Guangzhou – the sprawling capital of Guangdong, the southernmost province in China, where we meet Changhua Zhang and wife, Suqin Chen. With New Year’s looming, they are desperately seeking train tickets to their home in a small village in Sichuan, the most populous province in China, a place they left their two children 16 years ago. The Zhangs’ daughter Qin has halfway passed her rebellious teenage-hood, and their son Yang enjoys school more than his sister does. If the Zhangs’ ticket searching goes successful, it will be the family’s first reunion in 12 months. Although the Zhangs have rationalized their prolonged absence and the resultant estrangement from their children, especially Qin, the price to be paid to ensure that Qin and Yang stay in school, and thus can have at least the prospect of a better future, does not come to Qin’s understanding. Qin does not appreciate her parents’ sacrifice, and thereof ditches school, leaving her brother and grandmother in Sichuan, and too going south to find a job in another garment factory in the same city. As the Zhangs try to mend a family torn apart by Qin’s decision while pressuring her to return to Sichuan and resume her schooling before her eighteenth birthday, they invite her to accompany them home for the New Year. To get there, however, they must first pass the portals of the Guangzhou Train Station with an ocean of people – indeed their coworkers in South China. It is from here Fan’s film hits its visual peak by ceasing such a sensational yet claustrophobic urban setting, often with exasperation, and always with exhaustion. When the depleted family finally does reach their village home, the respite is not restful and respectful, as an argument between father and daughter devolves into violence, at certainly the film’s emotional zenith. The film ends openly on the mother’s determined mission home to take care of the son and the grandmother, and to seek righteousness or forgiveness and to give new hope a faultless chance.Last Train Home begins with large numbers – the 130 some million Chinese migrant workers who return home for the New Year’s holiday annually in the world’s largest human migration, and the 2,100 kilometers that separate the Zhang family during the rest of the year, yet once it has hit the audience with those, it narrows the focus considerably and deliberately as to how such a subsistent pattern in modern China affects one otherwise invisible family that proves a perfect, sometimes disturbing sample of the population at large. Last Train Home structures its narrative around a key section in the Chinese calendar – New Year, which is not only a symbol but also an important reminder of the last stronghold of Chinese traditions that have been withering rapidly with the invasion of Western culture. In the words of one poor traveller, “If the family can’t even celebrate New Year’s together, life would be pointless.” This annual trip is both of necessity and of liberty in its motivation, and both existential and spiritual in its devotion.
Last Train Home edges every layer of human emotion with vivid desperation and helplessness. In the film Titanic, as the aged Rose remembers the majestic sinking of Titanic while looking at its computer-generated animation, she says “Thank you for that forensic analysis, but, of course, the experience of it was…quite different.” However arduous Fan’s documentary may have been to shoot, it is always infinitely more arduous to live, both for filmmakers and for film’s subjects. Like migrant workers elsewhere, and probably everywhere, the Zhangs are being exploited and deprived; for 16 years, the couple has sent money home to support the two children being raised only by a peasant grandmother. Their same-time-next-year relation with their children is not of their choice, and is thus doomed to a boil precisely in time to be documented by Fan. Fan’s lens always knows time. It sees the haunting beauty of the nation’s rural side while also sensing the remarkable achievements – railways, tunnels, factories, and all kinds of upgrading – bought by sweats, tears, lost love, missing hope, and extremely cheap wages. The film is in the end about modern China, about the label “Made in China”, about rapid globalization, about the increased rural-urban conflict, about the sociocultural transformation and geopolitical development in developing countries within the current global economic environment, and surely about the impacts those changes have made to each and every individual of those countries.
What Fan does excellently is to manage to insinuate himself into the Zhangs’ lives to a rather remarkable extent, and to present everything in smallest details and sharpest nuances. This is exactly the kind of ethnographic participant observation an anthropologist may bring in the field. The abovementioned moment of confrontation: the violence continues when reunited father and daughter wind up brawling in grandma’s kitchen. “You want to film the real me – this is the real me!” Qin shouts as the camera continues to document the humiliated family. It seems, at least as edited, that it has been intimate for Qin to trust Fan and his crew that much. A brief but essential sequence near the end of the film reveals a few young, absorbed nightclub workers watching the televised Olympic opening ceremonies, and all of them burst into tears. Fan rarely evokes direct or deliberate commentary, yet here he touches the very bottom of the abyss of second generation migrant workers’ emptiness and blindness of their comfort zone and status quo. Moreover, there are numerous instances where the translation of Sichuanese into English triumphs estimably: at most, the flawed translation is required to comprehend the storyline; at least, the well-tempered translation serves to make sense to many idioms and slangs not readily translatable. Fan himself is also the editor and cinematographer of this film. Fan strings many shots of the urban chaos of Guangzhou and the rural tranquility of China’s southwest landscape, of rushing mass and crying individuals, of ageing parents’ anguish and despair, and of adolescent daughter’s rebelliousness and stubbornness together to tell a story that is both universal – children misunderstand parents’ sacrifices and parents forget what it is like to be a teenager – and rather particular to a changing China. Furthermore, the soundtrack of the film is outstanding. To augment the melancholy and the emotional bleakness, a prepared piano has been made to sing the unspeakable and unseeable. The score, while minimal in form and minimalist in style, is indeed contextually maximizing in effect. The occasionally added pop and dance music appropriately enhances the authentic flavor of each scene or sequence.
Last Train Home is an uncompromising portrayal of the Chinese migrant workers’ tired eyes, fried bodies, and frayed tempers at the train station before the New Year, as well as an honoring celebration of the resilience, determination, and optimism of China’s people. Already an award-winner at several documentary festivals, Last Train Home stands as an impressive feature debut from now a harbinger of greater documentary cinema – Lixin Fan. Fan, who has made seven trips to China and spent three years working on Last Train Home, has, in making this grand and often astonishing film, calculated the human cost of the miraculous economic growth in China by mapping a single family dysfunction, or indeed, tragedy presumably multipliable by millions. In sheer cinematic élan, Last Train Home follows the Zhangs’ hope for one New Year to finally reconcile with his family, yet their love and sacrifice of 16 years have fulfilled nothing but pure misery and agony, disinterestedly induced by China’s new social reality. The Zhangs’ story tells the sort of change that China is going through at the juncture between traditions and breaks with tradition.
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