Last Train Home

Last Train Home

87 Minutes

Last Train Home uses as a framing device the yearly journey that China’s migrant workers undertake from the factories and farms that house and employ them to their home villages for the New Year celebrations. It’s the biggest mass exodus of humans on Earth, with millions upon millions of people collectively making the trip every year. Rather than focusing on the event as a phenomenon unto itself, however, the film uses it to frame an examination of the lives that the people who face this yearly trip lead; an observational State of the Union for impoverished Chinese life that uses one intimate study as an example, the “six million other stories in the naked city” conceit taken to its furthest extreme.

It starts wide, opening with a huge, open view of a train yard, the tracks full of cars ready to take on passengers. A crowd is audible, but nothing can prepare you for its sheer scale. The camera pans to the left, away from the empty space, towards the source of the sound, which ramps up slowly, until the screen and the soundtrack are rumbling with the din of humanity, an image that vaguely evokes, a static, outrageously large-scale take on the opening of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. When the sound and the crowd threaten to overwhelm the scene, the film cuts to the space where all these people are waiting to go, an empty tunnel leading to the trains. The space fills up quickly, with people pushing to get on board, desperate to find a spot.

In a way, this movie is entirely about the problem of finding a spot, of the impossible situations that a vast number of people have found themselves in due to a lack of opportunities and resources. These migrant workers are forced to travel far from home in order to provide for their families; the only jobs available to them are in the cities. At the same time, the wages they can earn makes city living unaffordable for them, which renders their children ineligible for public schooling there, and makes the division of the family unit a foregone conclusion. These workers are essentially indentured servants to their employers, sending home as much of their money as they possibly can in the hopes of creating a better future for their kids; the kids they can never see. Families are pragmatic self-sustaining systems – the parent-providers, the grandparent-caretakers – but they’re also the heart of pressure-cycles that are themselves unsustainable – the hope of the kid as a potential escape.

We zero in on a family: Changhua Zhan wants to ensure that his 17-year-old daughter, Qin Zhang, doesn’t have to lead the same life he does, so he pushes her to study. He and his wife, Suqin Chen, nearly don’t make it onto a train this year, but they exhaust all possible resources and pay out the ear for a ticket. Their excitement to get home is marked by a sense of ambivalence – they see their family so rarely that it’s as if they are strangers. “When we’re there, we don’t even know what to say to the kids.” So they resort to platitudes – “Study hard so that you can have a better life, be sure to study hard.” The camera stays on Qin’s face as she listens to this advice, which is kept up and hammered into her relentlessly. It’s not unkind on her parents’ part, just intense. They don’t want her to understand the full breadth of their poverty, but they want her to understand the full scope of the risk she carries if she doesn’t complete her education. The concealment of one fact renders the other incomprehensible, though, and her resistance towards any message they send her is, by this point, innate. She regards her parents as strangers even more than they expect.

How can she not feel abandoned when she has no context for the world she lives in? She works on the farm, goes to school, and knows that her parents are working somewhere for money, so she begins to assume that money is what is important to them, more important than family. Qin’s ambivalence towards her parents and towards the idea of money results in her dropping out of school in order to “just live her life.” Tradition holds no sway over her, and her resentment towards her parents comes to a boil during a startling fight at home, when she announces her desire to leave school, screams at her dad to fuck off and basically disavows herself of her family. Qin’s at a factory now, and she’s young enough and it’s new enough that it feels like summer camp, but slowly her lack of a place in the world, and her inability to see a clear trajectory for herself dawn on her, and we see it in her eyes.

It’s a tragic story, and apparently a rather common one. The film doesn’t attempt to make you feel one way or the other about it; rather it makes an admirable effort to always be observing what’s going on. The story doesn’t exist outside of a context, because during all the crowd scenes, all the factory scenes, we see the people whose lives overlap the very ones we’re watching; it’s only a mild stretch to assume there are comparable situations in this sea of people. Going in close to see the Zhans, and leaving us with no tidy conclusions to reach, the film pulls back out and we’re left back at the train yard, outside a train getting ready to board, with a slowly gathering crowd running towards the doors, fading out as is appropriate for a story like this, one which has no apparent end.

by Andrei Alupului