A FEW YEARS AGO, Up the Yangtze followed a Chinese family whose marginal living was slowly flooded out by the Three Gorges Dam. The Canadian director Lixin Fan, who was the cameraman and the producer on Up the Yangtze, directs Last Train Home. If anything, it’s even more tragic, despite luminous visuals and the excellent reportage. Here, over the course of years, we see how the Zhang family have been broken up by their attempts to improve themselves. Their native farm is back in Szechuan. That’s 1,300 miles from where the mother and father toil as garment workers, sewing the low-cost jeans Americans buy at Costco and Wal-Mart.
Once a year, the Zhangs are able to purchase a $40 train ticket back to their village, where their daughter Qin and son, Yang, are being raised by their elderly grandma. It’s rather beautifully traditional, this farm, with well-kept poultry and hot misty mornings, but Qin thinks it’s a mud hole. She’s a classic rebellious 17-year-old who can’t wait to get out. The first new year gathering Fan records is tension-wracked. The parents left home when Qin was 1 year old. They’re essentially strangers who show up once a year to nag her and her brother about studying. Later, Qin drops out of school and becomes a factory girl, eating alone in the cafeteria and cramming into a dormitory. “Is it good here?” she answers the interviewer’s question. “Freedom is happiness.” Obviously, not an answer.
Fan chose his moments with care: the parents becoming irritable guilt-inducers, the beloved grandma turning briefly platitudinous, as old people will. The old lady’s life is revealed in asides: “We were called upon by the government to support agriculture,” she says, and one realizes that she probably means the Cultural Revolution. Maybe not since Albert Brooks’ comedy Real Life have we seen the explosive results of inserting cameras into the midst of a family ready to have it out. When the meltdown occurs, it seems irreparable. And Qin is happy to parcel out the blame: “You wanted to see the real me?” she screams at the camera.
This is just one story of estrangement among the 130 million workers in China who mob the train stations every new year. When the system breaks down, the crowds wait for days, standing, pushing up against riot-squad police and uneasy-looking soldiers. Even standing among this angry mob, let alone filming it, was an act of significant bravery. Of course, “130 million” is not the real number, considering the rest of the world torn from families to the sweatshops, to work their eyes and fingers away. The big difference between what goes on in Last Train Home and what goes on in, say, Mexico, may just be simply that the trains work a little more often in China.
Last Train Home
Unrated; 85 min.
