EYE Weekly: Last Train Home Review

originally published at Eye Weekly:

Editorial rating: **** (out of 5)

An uneasy verité takes hold as Montreal-based filmmaker Lixin Fan trains his two cameras on a family of migrant workers in Guangzhou, China. Couple Yang and Suqin 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, after some 16 years apart, is foiled when it turns out that the distance, the passing of time and a good dose of teen angst has given their 17-year-old daughter Qin some migratory plans of her own.

Gaining extensive access to the family’s day-to-day life that, over time, leads to relaxed interviews and much hard-won trust, Fan seamlessly crafts a family drama from his raw documentary footage. The Zhangs aren’t so much compliant as they are natural — as much themselves, it seems, as anyone under such scrutiny could be. They are ultimately unabashed as their slow-to-crack stoicism gives way under the stresses of life amongst the gears of industrialized China. (The eponymous train ride back to the country from Guangzhou city 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.