Documentary Last Train Home is an intimate look at Chinese family life.
This review is being written on a computer that was made in China, although the company that made it goes to great lengths to point out that their machines are designed in Southern California. That kind of subtle, pointed distancing is exactly what Lixin Fan attempts to dispel in Last Train Home, a documentary compiled after several years of following the scattered members of the Zhang family, a nuclear unit with a rather spacious orbit. Parents Suqin and Changhua work in a threadbare denim factory, sending home their earnings (and their guilt trips) to children Qin and Yang in the countryside. There, the children and their grandmother live a hybrid lifestyle, with feudal farming methods and familial hierarchies meeting telecommunications and a view of education as meal ticket-cum-lottery. Because of the extraordinary measures necessary to travel home, the parents and children share a roof only once a year, for the holiday week surrounding the Chinese New Year.
And because of the rapid shifts in Chinese society, the distance between generations is more than physical. Embittered with her parents, who she views as abandoning her, older daughter Qin quits her studies, rejecting the patient and laborious improvements so hard-won by her parents. The malaise that stunts the younger generation in the face of such remarkable improvements in lifestyle and the yearning of the parents for even greater strides in the future opens a surprisingly resonant point of access for western audiences (does generation X ring any bells?). It's not hard to guess who comes across as more sympathetic, but Fan never sells short the complexity of the dynamic by favouring one side of the story. Besides, climbing credit card debt and covert office blog-reading are generational calling cards that put most westerners far closer to the instant gratification embodied by the children of this story.
Fan exposes the myth of the East-West cultural divide, showing a group of people with nearly universal concerns and putting the lie to the ill-informed view of the Chinese people as dehumanized agents of the state. He is able to expose the complexity of their relationships with a detail that would have been prohibitively expensive and technical before digital video. The ease of access that makes this film possible, however, deprives the visuals of colour and variety, and composition is limited. This is not a tourist video or a talking-heads interview-fest, and neither is it a gritty exposé of factory conditions. Rather, Fan focuses visually on the mundane and bland reality of a deeply entrenched set of lives. The main worth of this film is its humanity, not its esthetics.
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