Last Train Home: Review By harveycritic

LAST TRAIN HOME

Zeitgeist Films

Reviewed for MovieWeb by Harvey Karten

Grade: B+

Directed By: Lixin Fan

Written By: Lixin Fan

Cast: Zhang Changhua, Zhang Qin, Chen Suqin

Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 8/25/10

Opens: September 3, 2010 at New York's IFC Center

"How ya gonna keep 'em/Down on the Farm/ After they've seen Shanghai, Ai" Somehow those lyrics do not sound as mellifluous as the ones penned about Paree in 1918 by Joe Young and Sam L. Lewis, but they make this point:

China may have gone (shh) capitalist, allowing that country's economy to top Japan's The prosperity, however, did not reach China's rural communities. Lixin Fan's doc*mentary, "Last Train Home," captures that unfortunate fact most graphically. The particular family covered by Lixin Fan, who both directs and serves a photographer did not go to Shanghai but rather to Guangzhou to work in the rag trade in a dismal factory, making five bucks a day for sixteen hours' work, some making jeans for export for Americans "with their 40-inch waists," as one worker jokes. It's no wonder that Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin keep pestering their two children to study hard, as does the youngsters' grandmother, but try to give advice to a teen!

The rebellious 16-year-old daughter, Zhang Qin is conflicted. On the one hand she resents the way her parents deserted her to work the year 'round in the factory, save for the New Year's holiday when they revisit the scrawny family farm. On the other hand, she wants to be free, to earn her own money-which is why, like so many American teens, she dropped out of school. It's a small world after all.

"Last Train Home" is about the greatest migration in history: not the one that finds thousands of Emperor penguins caught by Luc Jacquet's camera in Antarctica trekking to a breeding ground each year to mate for life Instead 130 million migrant workers head from bleak garment factories in the big, polluted cities where the only respite is the homecoming holiday that finds these particular, filmed migrant workers struggling to buy train tickets for the 1400 mile trip home-some standing the entire way. Life is hard.

The family apparently got so used to Lixin Fan's camera that they shucked any self-consciousness. In one scene the daughter curses, her dad thinking that she was disrespecting him directly. The father slaps the girl around, the girl hits back. Production notes state that the director did not know whether to break through his journalistic role to urge the family to calm down: the camera remained dispassionate allowing us in the audience to look at a moment of effective soap opera.

Family estrangement is not purely a Western concept, Confucian ideals notwithstanding. When daughter gets a job in a Shenzhen, spending time as well in a discotheque, the family ties are as good as severed. Maybe grandma and mom should have eased up on their incessant counsel to "study hard or you'll wind up like us," giving the teen an opening to do the opposite, as teens are wont to do. Some of the particularly dramatic shots are at the railway station that has so much pushing and shoving humanity that it makes Grand Central look like New York's Tower Records store after the MP3 with free and cheap music downloads became popular.

Unrated. 87 minutes. © 2010 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online