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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.
The technical and stylistic merit of Last Train Home is spectacular. The establishing shots of the crowded train station and factories, in addition to the panoramic shots of the city, of the train running through the long snowy mountain, and of the tranquil stillness of the country’s rurality, all inspire a sense of astounding sociocultural complexity and geographic expanse of China. In a sense, this film aims to capture rural China – a country has not changed in her history – while of enough consciousness and conscience seeks to understand urban China. What Fan does here is subtly visualizing such a tremendous rural-urban conflict against a superficially rapid social and economic advancement in China; his unique cinematography forcefully and convincingly builds a contrast between two institutionally different worlds coexisting in a torrent of change in China. Almost every frame of Last Train Home is stunningly photographed and expertly constructed; it reveals the solid labor of a sensitive filmmaker and humanist having immersed himself in the lives of his subjects to explore the story of some of their most intimate yet costly moments. And, the result thereby is incredibly salient and ultimately symbolic of a much broader perspective. A documentary can never be or duplicate the real world, yet importantly Fan’s film “captures what few other films have: the suffocating density of China’s population, the sheer weight of its many social and economic problems, and the unavoidable sense that a single human life here can hardly matter” (Chan 2010). Indeed, Last Train Home aspires to rely on its visual spiritedness to recite its own kind of poetry, and does that splendidly and estimably on every possible execution, whether arranged or improvised.
Taking a deeper look at Last Train Home, this film edges every layer of human emotion with vivid desperation and helplessness. Although China’s current status as an economic powerhouse regularly makes front-page news, stories about her constant struggles to manage crises that seem to grow directly out of frustrations among her most disenfranchised citizens are none less than extraordinary. The two exhausting holiday journeys the Zhangs have to take represent their only efforts as culturally qualified Chinese parents, yet such hopeless efforts are their only agonies as both parents and migrant workers in modern China. When the Zhangs have been unable even to secure tickets for their first multi-day trip, their agonies show; yet, when they do, the tickets still will not assure them a place on the unreliable and overfull trains, their agonies saturate. It is this defining moment that the film releases its true rationale. Those stressed and harrowing scenes at the Guangzhou Train Station, which are indelible chapters of Last Train Home, simply deliver a truth that is too agonizing to keep alive, as the film’s camera crew, and also audience, are swept up in such a miserable human tide. Nevertheless, there is something far more noteworthy within. 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.
To illustrate all such aspects in the most sensible and intimate way possible, Fan takes further steps. What he does excellently here 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 unerringly the kind of ethnographic participant observation an anthropologist may bring in the field, and this is particularly well rendered in the third act of the film. During the first act of the film, an older generation is seen left to the backbreaking, and barely sustainable, habitual task of farming, while raising two children, and such presumably is the optimized option for the Zhangs, but the sprain on the Zhangs is clear: the grandmother is determined but unwell; the younger son is restless and misses mom and dad; the elder daughter boils in her an upward resentment for her parents. Eventually and almost inevitably, it is the daughter’s spirit that cracks, shown in a scene in the third act that is as blunt, utterly unpredictable, and completely powerful as cinema can be. 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. Kenneth Turan says in his review (2010) that “[as] an expert, unobtrusive observer, Fan disappears inside his own film and allows us to get completely inside his subjects’ lives”. He comments that “although it’s clear that a family conflict is brewing, how it plays out in terms of fearsome confrontations and confounding of parental expectations is remarkably honest, painful and involving” (Turan 2010). A brief but essential sequence near the end of the film reveals several absorbed young nightclub workers, including Qin, 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’ spiritual emptiness and blindness of their comfort zone and status quo. Throughout Last Train Home, Qin’s choices possess a valiant strength as well as hopefulness to them; her sense of justice and destiny is inspiring, and her will stronger than her parents’. Nevertheless, her chronicle, along with her parents’, is devastating to watch, and therefore represents the tragically cyclical nature of many social problems caused by a fast-paced globalizing era. Fan understands that the Zhangs, who represent millions of migrant workers in China, have left their rural farms for the grinding struggle of life in urban factories in China’s de facto socioeconomic norms, while immeasurably suggesting that life in either setting is extremely difficult, as he and his camera witness everything firsthand.
Moreover, there are numerous instances in Last Train Home where conscientious details not just count but get gradually absorbed in a wider whole. Particularly, the colossal translation of Sichuanese into English triumphs admirably. 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 opportunely translatable. For example, what instigates the confrontation between the father and the daughter is the daughter’s deliberate use of the vulgar word – laozi, which is in fact a first-person pronoun used mostly by rugged men to address themselves. Lao means old, zi can mean a man’s social status; hereby laozi means old man, which contextually and functionally means “your old man”. Therefore, when a Chinese man says “Laozi wants to drink” he means “I want to drink.” Although the pronoun laozi is semantically masculine, and thus should be used by men exclusively, women do use that to express their power or strength. Nonetheless, if laozi is used by children in front of their parents, or kin and even nonkin of the same generation, it is deemed an outrageous disgrace, almost of taboo. Hence, when Qin yells laozi so callously to her father in the film, she infuriates her mother, angers her usually tender grandmother, and would surprise any Chinese who is watching. Notwithstanding here, laozi is conveniently translated to “fuck”, which, albeit its inaccuracy, works almost as good as literal translation. Of course, Fan hears that, knows its profound cultural undertone, and includes this vital part into his final cut. Visual facets are certainly the most important part of this film, and Fan knows this too well. He 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 most strikingly of adolescent daughter’s rebelliousness and stubbornness together to tell a story that is both universal – children do misunderstand parents’ sacrifices and parents forgot 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.
Reference:
Chan, Andrew (2010) Review of Last Train Home. Film Comment 46(5):71.
Turan, Kenneth (2010) Review of Last Train Home. Los Angeles Times, September 17: Entertainment.
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