 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
| Last Train Home | |||
"It’s the umbrellas that first catch your eye: scattered yellow and blue ones hovering over a group of people. Then the camera starts to pan, and the more brightly colored parasols you see — turquoise, fuchsia, purple — the more you realize that this crowd actually numbers in the hundreds. They’re Chinese workers waiting to catch trains for their annual pilgrimage home for the New Year. More than 130 million of them will ultimately make the journey." – David Fear, Time Out New York "The film opens with Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin desperately trying to secure highly sought-after train tickets. Having left their native Sichuan province shortly after the birth of their daughter, Qin, some 16 years earlier for a position in an urban garment factory, the couple only sees their family for a few days each February. Not surprisingly, their daughter, in high school at the film’s beginning, feels little attachment to her parents. When they finally make it home for a visit, they admonish her to stay in school. Shortly after, she drops out and begins a career as a factory worker. Alternating fixed, self-consciously framed shots with ragged handheld camerawork, Lixin captures both the beauty of the film’s rural and industrial settings and the fevered chaos of the family’s public and domestic crises. While an overhead shot of a group of thousands of tightly packed workers lining up in the rain turns the masses into a lovely abstraction, their umbrellas adding patches of color to an otherwise monochrome painting, later ground-level shots capture with astonishing immediacy the confusion and desperation of the crowds forced to stand for days, waiting for the train after a snowstorm in another part of the country has knocked out the power grids. Similarly, while lightly ironic overhead shots of the family’s rural village suggest a pastoral beauty with the just visible deterioration of the buildings the only sign of difficulty, when Lixin places his camera at the family center, things seem far less idyllic. In the film’s wrenching centerpiece, after Qin’s parents have succeeded in bringing her home for the New Year’s holiday, she gets into a heated argument with her father…. Also at play in this scene is the question of authorial involvement. Lixin’s approach in the film has been to withhold direct commentary, either in the form of narration or on-screen interviews with his subjects. His viewpoint comes through in his shaping of the material, particularly in some of his pointed juxtapositions, but he never explicitly addresses the camera’s ability to either influence the action or, potentially, exploit the actors. Then, in the middle of the violent exchange with her father, Qin breaks the fourth wall, turning to the camera and angrily declaring, “You want to film the real me? This is the real me.” Lixin’s film had been notable for the human face it brought to such global questions as shifting economics and the resultant demographic displacements, but it’s still been easy to distance ourselves from the subjects, particularly in the work’s more explicitly aestheticized moments. As Qin confronts us directly, questioning our own privileged position, such distance suddenly becomes impossible." – Andrew Schenker, Slant magazine |
|
||
| Gui tu lie che, Canada/China 2009 | |||
Director/Writer/Photography: Fan Lixin 85 mins, DV (16:9) In Mandarin, with English subtitles M offensive language Waitati Film Society |
|||
