Last Train Home (Monday, September 6, 2010) (114)

Last Train Home is a fascinating documentary by director Lixin Fan about the massive human migration from Chinese cities to the country side at the time of the Chinese New Year. Some 130 million people whose families live in the country commute over days and weeks from hundreds of main industrial metropolises back home to see their loved ones. The film focuses on the Zhan family and how this annual trip both affects their relationships as a unit and how it is a symptom of a greater erosion of the family structure in modern-day China, among the working class at least.

As the film opens in 2006, Changhua and Suqin Zhang are a husband and wife living in the massive production capitol of Guangzhou. They are having difficulty getting a train ticket to go back to her mother and father who are looking after their teenage daughter and preteen son, Qin and Yang. After striking out several times, they finally get two tickets to take the two-day trip back to their home in a rural part of the Sichuan Province, thousands of miles away.

Once they get back it becomes clear that there is a dramatic schism between them and their children. They never had much luck in school and left at a very early age to work in factories. Their kids are both smart and doing well in school, but there is a strong pull from the outside world and life factors to take Qin, who is now 16, out of school and send her to work in a city factory. This happens, and it basically ruins her life. She immediately is overwhelmed by the bigger world. She gets depressed and falls in with a bad group of friends. She is never happy and carries her bad attitude around with her everywhere.

At the following New Year's reunion back home, the parents can barely recognize the character of their formerly respectful, joyful daughter. They consider stepping in an changing her life again, but also know that the money she makes in her factory is drastically needed for their family. They discuss how they want to send their son Yang to work too, but now they can't because they can't let what happened to Qin happen to him.

For the Zhang family, it is a fundamental question of what is the true value of the money they get from Qin's work. Is it worthwhile if she is unhappy as a result? Is it worthwhile if it ruins their family bonds? What is the most important thing for everybody and do they even have a choice in the first place?

This is a fascinating debate and wonderful to look at next to Zhang Ke Jia's brilliant pseudo-documentary 24 City from last year. In that film the director shows how brazenly the Chinese government pushed farmers from the country to the cities and how the people responded to the change with happiness and hope. It then shows how now that some of those new cities created in the 1950s and 1960s are now dying (as new cities crop up), the people are left totally rootless. Last Train Home is a story of how people are trying to keep their connections to their native places (perhaps this is a post Cultural Revolution change in culture), but how difficult it is to stay absolutely traditional in such a difficult and modern environment.

I especially appreciate how the director doesn't really judge the bigger facts of the situation - that people are forced to move to big cities to work in sometimes substandard environments for pennies an hour. Rather he shows that taking those facts as a given, the people on the ground are faced with an impossible dilemma about the need for money, the hope for education and upward mobility and the love of tradition and history.

Most interestingly this film points out how very "here-and-now" contemporary China is both policy-wise and psychologically. There is no greater government body looking out for people's interest in China; people look out for themselves. As a result, most have to make dramatic decisions about their lives from one moment to the next, sometimes hurting themselves down the line in order to save themselves today. There is no long-term strategy for most in China and on a human level that is desperately frightening.

Stars: 3.5 of 4