Last train home

Chinese-Canadian cinematographer Lixin Fan traveled with a couple of migrant workers on annual return trips from a Guangzhou garment factory to their home village in Sichuan, 2,100 km away via train, buses and ferries, visiting their two children for Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) holidays. He edited his carefully-framed fly-on-the-wall cinema verite into an emotionally exhausting overview of modern China, peasant life and family tension, in Last Train Home.

The lightly-bearded father represses his emotions silently throughout the film, until a scene when his teenage daughter reveals the "real" self she says the director wanted her to show. She curses her parents for their year-long absences, using foul language that prompts her father to slap and hit her repeatedly. When his mother-in-law also upbraids the girl, the man pushes the woman aside, almost as if to ensure that the cameraman can focus on his daughter.

It's the movie's one scene in which the family openly acknowledge their awareness of the camera intruding quietly in their lives. The rest of the time, their awareness can only be sensed oblique expressions and careful choice of words (often clearly tackling a pre-agreed topic such as the girl's education and religious rituals). Amazingly, for a Chinese rural family, they do not try to mask or make light of the hardships of their dour lives and painful annual treks, the children's bad temperaments, and the maternal grandmother's burden of raising the two children. Life, they note once, is lived for one's children and parents, or else it's pointless.

Scenes in horrifyingly crowded railway stations, on luggage-crammed trains, and in cramped garment factories and poorly-curtained sleeping bunks, are discreet indictments of a socio-economic system that exploits peasants and stunts their lives and family feelings. A similar film could be made in any industrialised country, and tiring travel nightmares (albeit at a lesser scale of discomfort, with lesser levels of tolerance) could be photographed at Western seasons of family gathering, and the movie tacitly portrays the universal dehumanising effects of polluted cities. Nevertheless, the movie doesn't naively laud its contrasting panoramas of the harsh beauty of China's hinterland or the stifling emptiness and toughness of rural communities. As the parents frequently comment, there's little choice for them, and none is desirable.

The Zhang family's daughter abandons schooling in her grandmother's village, accompanies her upset parents back to Guangdong to work in a factory, and ends up fleeing that environment to become a trainee waitress in a Shenzhen nightclub. Her mother returns to the village, to ensure her son continues his schooling, leaving the husband alone in Guangzhou.

An optimist would sense that one or more of them may find more happiness. A pessimist would guess that they can never be happy. The movie's viewer cannot be either: one can only admire the documentary, and the workers who have to accept such fates.