Cast: Changhua Zhan, Suqin Chen, Qin Zhang,
Yang Zhang; Music: Olivier Alary; Direction: Lixin Yan
Lixin Yan’s Last Train Home has the quality
of a home video production. Its actors are mostly amateur performers who seem
to think they are in an annual day school play. It lacks a coherent plot. Yet, what
a spectacular emotion it evokes!
Every year in China, migrant workers in the
cities visit their native places for the Chinese New Year. More than 140 million
people travel during this time, making the largest human migration in a span of
two weeks. These workers are merely cogs in the massive wheel that spins around
China’s urban centres: the factories that manufacture all sorts of goods for
the consumption of the West. So there’s a factory that produces jeans, another
produces tennis racquets. The workers live in squalid conditions, not because
the pay is less but because they want to save every Yuan available to send back
home, to send their children to schools. Their grandparents raise the children.
Children don’t know their parents because they
see them only once a year. So they don’t know their parents and even resent
them for not being there. They hate the countryside, which is dull and filled
with the aged. On the contrary, the city life must be exciting because there is
action and money. Surely their parents wouldn’t have left them and gone there
if it was not an exciting place?
They don’t even know what their parents go
through to just visit them during the Chinese New Year. With 140 million
travelling, it must be next to impossible to get the tickets and even if you
did, you will have to elbow fight with hundred others to get into the trains. The
ticketing process and the train journey shown in the film make Indian Railways
look like Eurostar service.
The movie works like part-documentary and part-feature.
The characters talk to themselves, apparently in an attempt to explain their
situation, as if a press correspondent is sitting next to them with a mike.
These soliloquy sessions are important in establishing the story for the
non-Chinese audience. The camera is even self-consciously present at some
scenes where the characters talk straight to it, with one character shouting at
the camera, ‘Don’t you have better job than filming me?’
This filming technique is new. And it works
as an essential tool for Lixin Yan to present the story with as neutrally as
possible. There is no one to blame for the problems. Nobody is a villain and
nobody is a victim. They have their own choices and make their own life
decisions. Except in using profanity in front of one’s father. Then you get a
good, tight slap. Yours truly being one of the victims, he can totally identify
with that scene!
