The Province: Last Train Home

originally posted at The Province:

Editorial Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

by Katherine Monk

Montreal-based director and former Chinese broadcaster Lixin Fan directs this verite-style documentary that takes a close-up look at the annual migration of 130 million factory workers from major cities to their agrarian homes. Homing in on the Zhang family, Fan exposes the generational rifts as tradition faces off against prosperity and personal ego. It can't give us the big picture, but through great detail and editorial positioning, Last Train Home takes us on a ride that's at once exotic, terrifying and eerily prophetic of what lies ahead.

Moving through Chinese society like a large paper dragon on parade, economic fortune is not only dividing huge swaths of the population between rich and poor, it's also changing the way Chinese see themselves in relation to both traditional values and the western world.

It's a complicated, taboo-laden, and culturally spicy noodle of a situation to twirl with your mental chopsticks, but Lixin Fan does an elegant job of grabbing the hydra-headed beast by the throat in his feature documentary debut, Last Train Home.

A former TV news professional for Chinese state television, Fan decided to take a close-up look at changing Chinese society through a very specific portal: the annual migration of 130 million people during New Year celebrations.

Forget Mecca. This is the largest annual human migration in the world, as factory workers leave city centres to return to their ancestral villages and reconnect with family.

It's a brilliant place to start for a few reasons, and prime among them are the images. Fan's camera captures the frenetic chaos at train stations as hordes of people cram the platforms hoping to get a seat in oversold coaches.

The density of people as they scurry, laden with luggage, through the frame makes the reality of living in China undeniable. This is a place where people are so numerous and so apparently disposable, that finding personal identity and ego among the millions of other souls is a sizable challenge.

At times, the sea of people seem to move more like amoebae under a microscope than any sentient mass of humanity, and using a scientist's empirical process, Fan sorts through the specimens by finding ideal examples, and getting even closer.

The central focus in Last Train Home becomes the Zhang family. A typical clan from a small, agrarian village, the Zhang parents left their children for factory work, in the hopes they'd be able to provide their offspring with opportunities for improvement.

When their eldest daughter decides to turn her back on the family's larger plan, and drop out of school to seek work in a factory for herself, there's a crisis of epic proportions.

The moment is captured in all its uncomfortable drama as the father strikes his daughter in the face, and she - somewhat surprisingly - fights back like a feral bobcat.

One is never sure just how much the camera's presence has influenced or inspired the participants in this verite exploration, but it doesn't really matter if the whole movie is contrived, acted, or even scripted.

The reel derives a sense of authenticity from the way it's made. The camera becomes our window to a whole other world, where we're given the luxury of simply watching life unfold without overt commentary or an articulated point of view.

You can't really tell what Fan is thinking, as he maps the rifts and crevasses in a monolithic culture. There is no palpable agenda working here, and that releases the film from any obligation other than to entertain and enlighten the viewer.

The entertainment factor comes through the pictures of the metamorphosing Chinese landscape, as well as the soap-opera family dynamics, but the enlightenment is something the viewer has to create for herself.

Is economic success the be-all and end-all for a society, or is there something more to the human experience beneath the emotional permafrost of cold, hard cash?

Fan keeps the film open-ended, which only makes the experience richer for those willing to do a little work, but in the end, this feels like a small piece of a much larger puzzle.

It can't give us the big picture, but through great detail and editorial positioning, Last Train Home takes us on a ride that's at once exotic, terrifying and eerily prophetic of what lies ahead.