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.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Globe and Mail: Call it the low-budget, Canuck take on Scenes from a Marriage
originally appeared at The Globe and Mail:
Editorial Rating: *** (out of 4)
by James Adams
Canadians have a knack for making depressing films - think Goin’ Down the Road, Act of the Heart, Between Friends, Le Confessional. Zooey & Adam is very much in that tradition.
Shot on HD in and around Winnipeg on a budget so low as to be subterranean, it’s the story of a couple, the eponymous duo of the title, married one year, who are trying every which way to conceive. One summer weekend - this occurs less than 15 minutes into the film - they head to the bush on a camping trip where a late-night romantic revel is interrupted by a trio of belligerent, drunken males. As the husband is pinned to the ground by two of the threesome, his wife is raped. In short order, she discovers she is pregnant. Is the baby Adam’s? Or the result of the rape? Whatever the answer, does it even matter?
Zooey, who’s on the cusp of 30, believes it doesn’t: “It’s my baby; it’s our baby; it’s a baby,” she declares. “It’s ours if we decide it’s ours.” Adam is not so easily convinced. There’s talk of an abortion (she had one at 18 and isn’t keen to repeat), of a sperm test (he thinks his count may be low), of a DNA analysis (at 12 weeks, with seemingly a high chance for a miscarriage) -- but finally Adam relents to Zooey’s determination to bring the pregnancy to term. It’s a fateful decision, the harrowing ramifications of which Garrity traces in unsparing, quasi-documentary detail for the remainder of the film’s 85 minutes.
What to make of this Canuck Scenes from a Marriage? Certainly Garrity, who reportedly used only a three-page outline as a script for this, his third feature, and let his characters improvise much of the dialogue, was wise to cast fellow Winnipeggers Tom Keenan and Daria Puttaert as the leads. They are a thoroughly credible couple. The same adjective could be applied to pretty much the rest of the cast, including Omar Khan who plays Zooey’s new love interest as her relationship with Adam fades over three or four years to a blacker shade of dark and Adam himself unravels.
Had Garrity had the budget to hire, say, Evangeline Lilly as Zooey and Ryan Reynolds as Adam, the film almost surely would have capsized into laughable melodrama. Zooey & Adam remains a melodrama, but its very lack of glossy, blemish-free star power, gives the viewer the sense that real lives are being lived, not just acted. Certainly it’s not a great film: for all its handicam-DIY it is pretty conventional, with an ending that swerves into sub-Gothic Robert Aldrich territory (Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte; Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) while too neatly tying up what has gone before.
Still, this is a little movie that prompts big thoughts. Like: Has Hollywood so corrupted our taste that when an unabashedly serious film dealing with truly adult issues crosses our eyes we start groping for dismissives like “pretentious,” “overwrought,” “excruciating” and “bathetic”? Maybe we should also entertain words such as “brave” and “thought-provoking.”
Zooey & Adam plays at the Royal Cinema in Toronto Friday through March 11.
Editorial Rating: *** (out of 4)
by James Adams
Canadians have a knack for making depressing films - think Goin’ Down the Road, Act of the Heart, Between Friends, Le Confessional. Zooey & Adam is very much in that tradition.
Shot on HD in and around Winnipeg on a budget so low as to be subterranean, it’s the story of a couple, the eponymous duo of the title, married one year, who are trying every which way to conceive. One summer weekend - this occurs less than 15 minutes into the film - they head to the bush on a camping trip where a late-night romantic revel is interrupted by a trio of belligerent, drunken males. As the husband is pinned to the ground by two of the threesome, his wife is raped. In short order, she discovers she is pregnant. Is the baby Adam’s? Or the result of the rape? Whatever the answer, does it even matter?
Zooey, who’s on the cusp of 30, believes it doesn’t: “It’s my baby; it’s our baby; it’s a baby,” she declares. “It’s ours if we decide it’s ours.” Adam is not so easily convinced. There’s talk of an abortion (she had one at 18 and isn’t keen to repeat), of a sperm test (he thinks his count may be low), of a DNA analysis (at 12 weeks, with seemingly a high chance for a miscarriage) -- but finally Adam relents to Zooey’s determination to bring the pregnancy to term. It’s a fateful decision, the harrowing ramifications of which Garrity traces in unsparing, quasi-documentary detail for the remainder of the film’s 85 minutes.
What to make of this Canuck Scenes from a Marriage? Certainly Garrity, who reportedly used only a three-page outline as a script for this, his third feature, and let his characters improvise much of the dialogue, was wise to cast fellow Winnipeggers Tom Keenan and Daria Puttaert as the leads. They are a thoroughly credible couple. The same adjective could be applied to pretty much the rest of the cast, including Omar Khan who plays Zooey’s new love interest as her relationship with Adam fades over three or four years to a blacker shade of dark and Adam himself unravels.
Had Garrity had the budget to hire, say, Evangeline Lilly as Zooey and Ryan Reynolds as Adam, the film almost surely would have capsized into laughable melodrama. Zooey & Adam remains a melodrama, but its very lack of glossy, blemish-free star power, gives the viewer the sense that real lives are being lived, not just acted. Certainly it’s not a great film: for all its handicam-DIY it is pretty conventional, with an ending that swerves into sub-Gothic Robert Aldrich territory (Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte; Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) while too neatly tying up what has gone before.
Still, this is a little movie that prompts big thoughts. Like: Has Hollywood so corrupted our taste that when an unabashedly serious film dealing with truly adult issues crosses our eyes we start groping for dismissives like “pretentious,” “overwrought,” “excruciating” and “bathetic”? Maybe we should also entertain words such as “brave” and “thought-provoking.”
Zooey & Adam plays at the Royal Cinema in Toronto Friday through March 11.
Toronto Star: Zooey and Adam, Experimental Cinema Worth Watching
originally appeared at the Toronto Star:
Editorial Rating: *** (out of 4)
by Jason Anderson
Fifteen years after a group of Danish mavericks outlined a manifesto for a leaner, purer brand of cinema they dubbed Dogme, some directors are still trying to strip down the filmmaking process to its bare essentials.
In the case of Zooey & Adam – an often harrowing drama about a married couple coping with the aftermath of a violent crime – Winnipeg filmmaker Sean Garrity did away with such apparent necessities as a script, a budget and even the tiniest of crews.
Instead, he and his actors developed Zooey & Adam scene by scene in chronological order, with Garrity filming all by his lonesome with a digital camcorder. Only toward the end of the shoot did the participants realize that this exercise – which Garrity originally hoped would be the basis of a future screenplay – was yielding a bona-fide movie.
Garrity, whose debut film Inertia won the award for best Canadian first feature at TIFF in 2001, has referred to his third feature as an example of "solo cinema." Whether other directors will follow in his stead remains to be seen – it's hard to resist the allure of having your own craft services table. Yet Zooey & Adam's unusual degree of intimacy and emotional power prove that methods like Garrity's can produce strong results.
They also facilitate courageous performances by Daria Puttaert and Tom Keenan as the titular couple. These young Winnipeggers' plans for a happy family life are torn apart when Zooey is sexually assaulted during a camping trip. When Zooey discovers that she's pregnant, Adam agonizes over the question of whether he's the father.
As time goes on, their torments are compounded by some difficult and arguably callous decisions by both parties. In other words, neither character is easy to like, a fact that may further alienate audience members already put off by Garrity's barebones tactics.
The rising tensions and mostly grim mood can make for a gruelling viewing experience. And as often happens with improvisation-based narrative features, the movie's essential volatility works against the possibility of a satisfying and coherent conclusion.
Then again, Zooey & Adam is designed to provoke viewers rather than coddle them. The characters' moral, ethical and emotional dilemmas would be plenty troubling even if Garrity weren't so keen on challenging assumptions about how a movie fiction ought to look and function. His film's sheer boldness makes this accidental experiment in solo cinema well worth watching.
Editorial Rating: *** (out of 4)
by Jason Anderson
Fifteen years after a group of Danish mavericks outlined a manifesto for a leaner, purer brand of cinema they dubbed Dogme, some directors are still trying to strip down the filmmaking process to its bare essentials.
In the case of Zooey & Adam – an often harrowing drama about a married couple coping with the aftermath of a violent crime – Winnipeg filmmaker Sean Garrity did away with such apparent necessities as a script, a budget and even the tiniest of crews.
Instead, he and his actors developed Zooey & Adam scene by scene in chronological order, with Garrity filming all by his lonesome with a digital camcorder. Only toward the end of the shoot did the participants realize that this exercise – which Garrity originally hoped would be the basis of a future screenplay – was yielding a bona-fide movie.
Garrity, whose debut film Inertia won the award for best Canadian first feature at TIFF in 2001, has referred to his third feature as an example of "solo cinema." Whether other directors will follow in his stead remains to be seen – it's hard to resist the allure of having your own craft services table. Yet Zooey & Adam's unusual degree of intimacy and emotional power prove that methods like Garrity's can produce strong results.
They also facilitate courageous performances by Daria Puttaert and Tom Keenan as the titular couple. These young Winnipeggers' plans for a happy family life are torn apart when Zooey is sexually assaulted during a camping trip. When Zooey discovers that she's pregnant, Adam agonizes over the question of whether he's the father.
As time goes on, their torments are compounded by some difficult and arguably callous decisions by both parties. In other words, neither character is easy to like, a fact that may further alienate audience members already put off by Garrity's barebones tactics.
The rising tensions and mostly grim mood can make for a gruelling viewing experience. And as often happens with improvisation-based narrative features, the movie's essential volatility works against the possibility of a satisfying and coherent conclusion.
Then again, Zooey & Adam is designed to provoke viewers rather than coddle them. The characters' moral, ethical and emotional dilemmas would be plenty troubling even if Garrity weren't so keen on challenging assumptions about how a movie fiction ought to look and function. His film's sheer boldness makes this accidental experiment in solo cinema well worth watching.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Globe and Mail: Last Train Home
originally published at the Globe and Mail:
by James Adams
If this documentary came with a pre-screening advisory, it probably would read: Warning! Contents Under Pressure. The contents in this case are the four members of the Zhang family and, by metaphoric extension, the 1.4 billion residents with whom they share the People’s Republic of China.
Shot over three arduous years by Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan (he was an associate producer on 2007’s Up the Yangtze), Last Train Home structures its narrative around a key moment in the Chinese calendar: New Year, when, each January or February, many of the nation’s 130 million migrant urban factory workers take the one-week holiday to return to the rural communities they left behind. It’s the world’s single largest human migration, we’re told at the film’s start – an exodus almost existential in its motivation. In the words of one traveller, “If the family can’t even celebrate New Year’s together, life would be pointless.”
It’s an intense and tense time, unsurprisingly, and superbly realized by Lixin’s unflinching yet compassionate eye, the Zhang family his microcosm for the Chinese macrocosm. More 21st-century Grapes of Wrath than Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the film opens in the winter of 2006 in Guangzhou, the sprawling capital of Guangdong province, where we meet Changhua Zhang and wife, Suqin, sewing-machine operators in the same garment factory. With New Year’s looming, they are desperately seeking train tickets to Sichuan, the province they left 2,000 kilometres to the west 16 years earlier. The Zhangs’ two children – a girl, Qin, who has entered full-blown teenagehood, and a young boy, Yang – still live in a village there. If the ticket search is successful, it will be the family’s first reunion in 12 months.
Heartwarming though the film seems, the viewer quickly discerns that this fractured family is on the verge of crumbling. The parents have rationalized their prolonged absences (and resultant estrangement from their children) as the price to be paid to ensure that son and daughter stay in school and have at least the prospect of a better future.
Qin, however, doesn’t appreciate the sacrifices: “My parents barely lived with me,” she says. “How can I have any feelings?” Around the film’s midpoint, she ditches school, leaving brother and grandmother in Sichuan to get a job in a (yes) garment factory in (yes) Guangzhou.
Qin’s parents try to repair the rupture while continuing to pressure their daughter to return to Sichuan and resume her schooling. Just before her 18th birthday, they invite her to accompany them to their home village for New Year’s. But to get there, they must first pass the portals of the Guangzhou train station. Here, Lixin’s film becomes a kind of Boschean vision of hell: A snowstorm has knocked out much of the electricity feeding China’s rail system, leaving hundreds of thousands of frantic migrants to swarm and sweat in the station, sometimes for days, as they wait for service to resume. Working deep within the madding crowd, Lixin’s camera brilliantly captures its claustrophobic crush, the frustrations, the exhaustion.
When the depleted Zhang family finally does reach the home village, the respite is not restful. An argument between father and daughter devolves into violence. In perhaps the film’s most electrifying, or at least Godardian moment, a teary-eyed Qin turns to the camera to defiantly proclaim: “You want to film the real [reel?] me? This is the real me!’”
Sober? Dark? Bleak? You bet. Yet for all its unsparing depiction of frayed nerves, slumped bodies and wan faces, Last Train Home is, in its matter-of-fact way, a celebration of sorts of the resilience, determination and stoicism of China’s people. Lixin’s camera always has time, it seems, for the haunting beauty of the nation’s countryside while noting the impressive achievements – the bridges, railways, tunnels and factories – bought by blood, sweat, tears and cheap wages. Already an award-winner at several documentary festivals, Last Train Home stands as an impressive feature debut from the thirtysomething Lixin Fan and a harbinger of more great documentary cinema.
by James Adams
If this documentary came with a pre-screening advisory, it probably would read: Warning! Contents Under Pressure. The contents in this case are the four members of the Zhang family and, by metaphoric extension, the 1.4 billion residents with whom they share the People’s Republic of China.
Shot over three arduous years by Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan (he was an associate producer on 2007’s Up the Yangtze), Last Train Home structures its narrative around a key moment in the Chinese calendar: New Year, when, each January or February, many of the nation’s 130 million migrant urban factory workers take the one-week holiday to return to the rural communities they left behind. It’s the world’s single largest human migration, we’re told at the film’s start – an exodus almost existential in its motivation. In the words of one traveller, “If the family can’t even celebrate New Year’s together, life would be pointless.”
It’s an intense and tense time, unsurprisingly, and superbly realized by Lixin’s unflinching yet compassionate eye, the Zhang family his microcosm for the Chinese macrocosm. More 21st-century Grapes of Wrath than Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the film opens in the winter of 2006 in Guangzhou, the sprawling capital of Guangdong province, where we meet Changhua Zhang and wife, Suqin, sewing-machine operators in the same garment factory. With New Year’s looming, they are desperately seeking train tickets to Sichuan, the province they left 2,000 kilometres to the west 16 years earlier. The Zhangs’ two children – a girl, Qin, who has entered full-blown teenagehood, and a young boy, Yang – still live in a village there. If the ticket search is successful, it will be the family’s first reunion in 12 months.
Heartwarming though the film seems, the viewer quickly discerns that this fractured family is on the verge of crumbling. The parents have rationalized their prolonged absences (and resultant estrangement from their children) as the price to be paid to ensure that son and daughter stay in school and have at least the prospect of a better future.
Qin, however, doesn’t appreciate the sacrifices: “My parents barely lived with me,” she says. “How can I have any feelings?” Around the film’s midpoint, she ditches school, leaving brother and grandmother in Sichuan to get a job in a (yes) garment factory in (yes) Guangzhou.
Qin’s parents try to repair the rupture while continuing to pressure their daughter to return to Sichuan and resume her schooling. Just before her 18th birthday, they invite her to accompany them to their home village for New Year’s. But to get there, they must first pass the portals of the Guangzhou train station. Here, Lixin’s film becomes a kind of Boschean vision of hell: A snowstorm has knocked out much of the electricity feeding China’s rail system, leaving hundreds of thousands of frantic migrants to swarm and sweat in the station, sometimes for days, as they wait for service to resume. Working deep within the madding crowd, Lixin’s camera brilliantly captures its claustrophobic crush, the frustrations, the exhaustion.
When the depleted Zhang family finally does reach the home village, the respite is not restful. An argument between father and daughter devolves into violence. In perhaps the film’s most electrifying, or at least Godardian moment, a teary-eyed Qin turns to the camera to defiantly proclaim: “You want to film the real [reel?] me? This is the real me!’”
Sober? Dark? Bleak? You bet. Yet for all its unsparing depiction of frayed nerves, slumped bodies and wan faces, Last Train Home is, in its matter-of-fact way, a celebration of sorts of the resilience, determination and stoicism of China’s people. Lixin’s camera always has time, it seems, for the haunting beauty of the nation’s countryside while noting the impressive achievements – the bridges, railways, tunnels and factories – bought by blood, sweat, tears and cheap wages. Already an award-winner at several documentary festivals, Last Train Home stands as an impressive feature debut from the thirtysomething Lixin Fan and a harbinger of more great documentary cinema.
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