Last Train Home (2010)

Last Train Home

★ ★ out of 5

Directed by Lixin Fan

Imdb Link

Every year, one hundred and thirty million Chinese workers migrate back home to their home towns, the largest human migration in the world.

This documentary, about Chinese workers going home over a holiday season, is very bland, uninteresting, and all together a bit of a mess of a film. Last Train Home may be about this grand event, but it really centers on a single family, traveling home to be together. This is a cool premise, taking a grand event, and giving a more intimate view on the subject matter, however, they picked the most bland family possible to follow. They were not an interesting group of characters. I’m not saying that they should have been like a reality TV show family or anything, but just people that have something interesting about them. An average family will be interesting to watch, somehow they managed to find a family with nothing interesting about any of them. The director of Last Train Home focuses on these characters to give us a more intimate view on the Chinese migration, but instead of feeling close to these people, they still feel just like more faces in the enormous crowds. There’s a shot in the end of the film, where one of the family members walks away from the camera and blends into the crowd, which leads me to believe that possibly having these people be nearly characterless was a directorial choice to give them an equal importance to everyone else in the crowds. If that was a directorial choice, I respect that, but I can’t forgive it. There is a reason why people write compelling characters, and most documentaries focus on interesting people. I will give Last Train Home credit for the way it looks. It’s hard to shoot a documentary with really good cinematography, especially when the documentary mostly focuses on large crowds of people waiting for trains. However Last Train Home managed to look stunning. The composition of shots and shot choices are for the most part always pretty well done, and interesting to look at. Other than that though, I cannot say that Last Train Home was very good at all.