Lixin Fan's documentary, out now, captures the cost of China's prosperity, and Tomboy is quietly discomforting.
Last Train Home
For a film that left me feeling as though I’d been beaten about the head with a lead pipe, Last Train Home has some gorgeous moments. The best comes right at the start, a slow widescreen pan from an empty expanse of train station platform to a large nearby crowd … no, wait, it isn’t large, it’s vast. And as the title captions soon make clear, we’re seeing barely a drop in the bucket, the bucket being the world’s largest annual human migration: these are some of China’s 130 million migrant workers, queuing up to go home for the New Year.
From this broadest of broad-canvas openings, director and cinematographer Lixin Fan (an associate producer on Up the Yangtze; this fly-on-the-wall documentary is his directorial debut) narrows his focus down to a single migrant couple. They left their home village a decade-and-a-half ago in search of factory jobs, leaving their children to be raised by grandparents. They send money home and once a year they return themselves, to a daughter and son who see them as intrusive, hectoring strangers.
Fan follows this family over several years, through a range of heartbreaking developments. The captioning that explains the opening scene is not representative of his style, which generally involves observing without explanatory gloss. But it’s clear, not least from the grand scale of that opening, that he’s offering us this family’s experience as a representative encapsulation of China’s current historical moment: making ruinous sacrifices to ride a wave of prosperity that, as the 2008 economic crisis hits, begins to collapse.
The implicit claim that we can find China in this one family’s story would seem more robust if we were given more information on the wider social context, but Fan’s attention is fully engaged by the project of slipping us inside the family’s closed circle and showing us their private lives. He captures these reserved, courteous people in several moments of extreme emotional exposure, allowing them to emerge so fully as individuals that it’s hard to accept them as representative figures; so much of their story arises from their particular temperaments. This amounts to the failure of the film’s grander ambitions, but since it’s a failure that gives rise to a powerful if not to say harrowing domestic drama, it’s one many directors might envy.
LAST TRAIN HOME, directed by Lixin Fan. Click here for cinemas and times.
A great deal goes unsaid in Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy, which is another way of saying that this French writer/director places a great deal of faith in her actors, most of whom are not yet pubescent. This is a quiet, discomfiting film, exceptionally well-observed, and it rests on the shoulders of the best cast of child actors I’ve seen since Boy.
Ten-year-old Laure (Zoé Héran, extraordinary in her first big screen role) has just moved to a new neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris. Short-haired and androgynous, she could easily pass for a boy. When she meets the local kids, she decides, without seeming to think about it, to put this to the test. She introduces herself as Mickaël, with consequences that would not seem particularly earth-shattering if Laure were less vividly played.
Sciamma lets us glimpse a range of explanations for Laure’s desire to go down this road. Her little sister is a girly-girl charmer with whom she has no desire to compete; their mother is pregnant with a long-desired first son who seems to be usurping Laure’s role in the family before he’s even born; and Laure is sitting right on the cusp of puberty, about to lose the ability to take off her shirt in public. But it’s less the underlying psychology than the politics of child friendships that give the film its bite, particularly the unspoken rules dictating what boys and girls are allowed to do and how they’re allowed to treat each other. As Laure’s deception grows harder and harder to maintain, you may find, as I did, that this unassuming little story has you on the edge of your seat.
TOMBOY, directed by Céline Sciamma, in cinemas from December 1. Click here for cinemas and times.