A 22-year-old Chinese journalist working in a Beijing TV station stumbles across a pile of written transcripts from a documentary project. Fascinated, new college graduate Lixin Fan begins reading and doesn't finish until 15 hours later. He is struck at how people reveal themselves with just a few words. And--fortunately for those who would later watch "Last Train Home" years later, a documentarian is born.
Filmmakers like Lixin are the antithesis of Michael Moore, who appears to start with a premise and work from there to turn it into populist, self-aggrandizing entertainment. In contrast, Lixin looks at people first, context second. "Last Train Home", his third film and the first solely directed by him, is an enduring testimony to the classic, observational, verite approach, perfectly and narrowly true to the spirit of the earliest documentarians, like Fred Wiseman. One can only image the difficulty of taking three years of footage and crafting it so that a story unfolds with hardly more than a page of dialog, total. The totality of "Last Train Home" is not due to luck or any predetermined endings-- but due to passion--passion to understand who people are and the circumstances that shape their lives.
"Last Train Home" teeters between two worlds represented by several plans: the model versus the traditional; the parents versus the children; the rural versus the urban; the centered and stable versus the fragmented. As the film begins, we learn that stalwart and value-driven parents Chen Suqin (mother) and Zhang Chunghua (father) left their village in Szechuan province l7 years ago to earn enough money to support their children. While their sacrifice is not unusual for 21st century peasant families, it fails to register on their children--Qin, about 14 at the start of the story, and her 10-year-old brother. They were raised by their grandparents: their parents are only dim figures who appear once a year at Chinese New Year and then vanish again. Although there are phone calls, the human connection is missing. Suqin can only bring herself to ask about grades, and Zhang is a taciturn man who can only let his wife speak for him. This is a family like many of the 130,000 migrant families in today's China: teetering on the edge, acting with determination to move the next generation forward. But by the end of the film, a question hangs in the air: will the efforts all come to nothing? Will the increasing materialism seen in China today, and other industrial nations, be all encompassing, destroying family bonds? Extraordinary patience and fortitude were needed to play this story out. Portraying Chinese New Year travel is just one example. The camera person braved physically crushing circumstances in the remarkably poorly managed and desperate crowds teeming in the Guangzhou railway station to go home. The scenes were essential, to show the Zhang family departing for their village once, twice (with Qin, who briefly worked in the same city with her parents), and a final third time - when it becomes painfully clear that the family cannot continue as it is. The camera also managed to capture an amazing sequence: a physical altercation between father and daughter - one in which the girl "breaks the fourth wall" and acknowledges to the lens what is happening --then defiantly continues her behavior. The fight itself is emblematic. It seems to represent the rift between the generations - parents with one clearcut set of dreams, and a young woman who wants to become her own person--not merely the object of her parents' hopes and desires--a young woman who is so hungry for selfhood and recognition that she will drop out of school to begin the same rat race that her parents have endured for almost two decades.
There is no definitive ending to the story. The viewer only knows that the brother at home will face greater pressures than ever - with less and less motivation to withstand it. The Confucian ideal of the closely linked family, with dependable submissive ties, is disappearing before our eyes. Like a male polar bear pacing across expanses of ice and encountering the weaker of its kind, China seems to be devouring its own, to flourish and establish its dominance in the world.
Filmmakers like Lixin are the antithesis of Michael Moore, who appears to start with a premise and work from there to turn it into populist, self-aggrandizing entertainment. In contrast, Lixin looks at people first, context second. "Last Train Home", his third film and the first solely directed by him, is an enduring testimony to the classic, observational, verite approach, perfectly and narrowly true to the spirit of the earliest documentarians, like Fred Wiseman. One can only image the difficulty of taking three years of footage and crafting it so that a story unfolds with hardly more than a page of dialog, total. The totality of "Last Train Home" is not due to luck or any predetermined endings-- but due to passion--passion to understand who people are and the circumstances that shape their lives.
"Last Train Home" teeters between two worlds represented by several plans: the model versus the traditional; the parents versus the children; the rural versus the urban; the centered and stable versus the fragmented. As the film begins, we learn that stalwart and value-driven parents Chen Suqin (mother) and Zhang Chunghua (father) left their village in Szechuan province l7 years ago to earn enough money to support their children. While their sacrifice is not unusual for 21st century peasant families, it fails to register on their children--Qin, about 14 at the start of the story, and her 10-year-old brother. They were raised by their grandparents: their parents are only dim figures who appear once a year at Chinese New Year and then vanish again. Although there are phone calls, the human connection is missing. Suqin can only bring herself to ask about grades, and Zhang is a taciturn man who can only let his wife speak for him. This is a family like many of the 130,000 migrant families in today's China: teetering on the edge, acting with determination to move the next generation forward. But by the end of the film, a question hangs in the air: will the efforts all come to nothing? Will the increasing materialism seen in China today, and other industrial nations, be all encompassing, destroying family bonds? Extraordinary patience and fortitude were needed to play this story out. Portraying Chinese New Year travel is just one example. The camera person braved physically crushing circumstances in the remarkably poorly managed and desperate crowds teeming in the Guangzhou railway station to go home. The scenes were essential, to show the Zhang family departing for their village once, twice (with Qin, who briefly worked in the same city with her parents), and a final third time - when it becomes painfully clear that the family cannot continue as it is. The camera also managed to capture an amazing sequence: a physical altercation between father and daughter - one in which the girl "breaks the fourth wall" and acknowledges to the lens what is happening --then defiantly continues her behavior. The fight itself is emblematic. It seems to represent the rift between the generations - parents with one clearcut set of dreams, and a young woman who wants to become her own person--not merely the object of her parents' hopes and desires--a young woman who is so hungry for selfhood and recognition that she will drop out of school to begin the same rat race that her parents have endured for almost two decades.
There is no definitive ending to the story. The viewer only knows that the brother at home will face greater pressures than ever - with less and less motivation to withstand it. The Confucian ideal of the closely linked family, with dependable submissive ties, is disappearing before our eyes. Like a male polar bear pacing across expanses of ice and encountering the weaker of its kind, China seems to be devouring its own, to flourish and establish its dominance in the world.