LAST TRAIN HOME
by Kieran Grant
January 13, 201
Editorial Rating: ****
An uneasy verité takes hold as Montreal-based filmmaker Lixin Fan trains his two cameras on a family of migrant workers in Guangzhou, China. The Zhangs have long since left their two children behind with grandparents on the farm in order to make money as factory workers in the city. Their pledge to reunite the family in domestic normalcy is foiled when it turns out that the distance, the years and a good dose of teen angst has given their daughter Qin some migratory plans of her own.
Fan seamlessly crafts a family drama from his raw documentary footage. The Zhangs aren’t so much compliant as they are natural and, ultimately, unabashed as their slow-to-crack stoicism gives in to the stresses of industrialized Chinese society. (The eponymous train ride back to the country is the sort of mind-boggling, state-sanctioned ordeal that’d have Westerners hyperventilating from acute inconvenience.) Yet this is hardly National Geographic turf, and Last Train Home becomes all the more resonant and empathetic as it draws us into the Zhangs' live-to-work reality — a reality that may well await us, too.
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