Last Train Home (Gui tu lie che) - Lixin Fan

un altro mondo esiste, una popolazione pari a due volte gli abitanti dell'Italia si sposta dalle città per tornare ai villaggi e cittadine di campagna di provenienza, tutti nella stessa settimana.
Lixin Fan segue una coppia che torna a rivedere i figli ormai cresciuti, allevati dai nonni e ormai lontani dai genitori, e irriconoscenti.
quei lavoratori, trattati quasi come schiavi, hanno costruito le città cinesi (i grattacieli di Shanghai di "Her", per esempio) e i vestiti e i jeans che indossiamo in tutto il mondo.
la crescita economica cinese ha cambiato la vita dei cinesi, e ormai di tutti, e non se ne vede la fine, purtroppo.
i costi umani sono immensi e le opportunità e la costrizione di cambiare e fuggire da una vita di stenti a un'altra vita di privazioni (per la stragrande maggioranza) sono sotto gli occhi di tutti.
il film non annoia un minuto e ci svela un mondo che molti non conosciamo (più o non ancora).
grande cinema da cercare e guardare con gli occhi aperti - Ismaele

ps: per alcuni istanti il treno del lungo viaggio sembra quello di "Snowpiercer".

…There is so much to say about this great film. You sense the dedication of Lixin Fan and his team. (He did much of the cinematography and editing himself.) You see once again the alchemy by which a constantly present camera eventually becomes almost unnoticed, as people live their lives before it. You know the generations almost better than they know themselves, because the camera can be in two places and they are usually in one or the other.

There is a quiet moment in a mall. On their day off, Zhang Qin and her friends go shopping. They like a pair of jeans: “Are these made in our factory?” No, in another. Of course they want them. Of course their generation wants them. But their generation doesn't want to work years leaning over a sewing machine and sleeping in a dorm.

We read about the suicides in Apple's plants in China. Seeing this film, you suspect there are many suicides among workers in factories whose brands are less famous than Apple. Chinese peasants no longer live without television and a vision of another world. They no longer live in a country without consumer luxuries. “Last Train Home” suggests that the times they are a-changin'. The rulers of China may someday regret that they distributed the works of Marx so generously.

da qui

…è interessante notare come la spiritualità sia relegata ai margini, in quella campagna che tutti fuggono e che appare senza speranza, il che va a consolidare il materialismo alienante che viene esplicato in quegli squallidi spazi (i dormitori, le fabbriche, le strade) che, pur promettendo a chi è distante da essi lavoro e, quindi, vita, sfornano invece la morte, alienando l'individuo e costringendolo a un'esistenza di sfruttamento e grettezza. Inutile, quindi, fare ulteriori considerazioni a riguardo (sarebbero pleonastiche): l'unica cosa che, dopo aver visto questo film, vien da dire e che, forse, sola centrerebbe il punto focale di Last train home  è 'fanculo il capitalismo, e tanto basta.

da qui

He seems to get his camera into the most unlikely places, such as inside the marauding crowds at the train station, or inside the train itself. It led me to ask certain questions about the filmmaker, who deliberately tries to remain invisible. How did he secure tickets for the train? How many of these shots are staged? At one point, the father, Changhua, leaves the train station, and the camera trails after him, as if he had just given up. A minute later, we cut to outside the station, and the camera is in front of him. This suggests that the shot was staged, that the director asked Changhua to stop walking for a few minutes while he set up a new shot.

In this, the filmmaking is not as invisible as it wants to be, and it can detract from the story. Yet in another scene, Changhua slaps Qin (who has just dropped an "f" bomb in front of her parents). In tears, she turns to the camera and screams at it, "You want to film the real me? This is the real me!" Fan's camera does not blink, and silently holds the shot for a while longer. This family may have known they were being filmed, and agreed to certain shots, but their pain is very much real…

http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/2010/lasttrain.shtml

…Fan finds power in contrast, from the striking melee of the station where almost an entire city waits hours for a ride home and the stoic images of multitudes of workers crammed on a train, to the intimacy of a family where, through the direct fault of no one, patience is about to snap. On the one hand this is a very personal tale of one family's struggle to make the best of trying circumstances, on the other it is a stinging indictment on a political and economic structure that is stretching families to breaking point.

Although standing in the shadow of Up The Yangtze somewhat due to the similarity of some of the subject matter and a little overlong, this is nevertheless a striking and thought-provoking debut that puts a very personal face on a phenomenon that, Fan hints, could well be tearing Chinese society apart from within.

da qui

…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…

da qui

…This is a heartbreaking film. It is a film as much about migration as it is about family, love, sacrifice, rebellion. It's about dreams - dreams of your own, dreams for your children, and your childrens' dreams, one carrying into another, and now conflicting with each other. There are many moments that are so riveting that they seem fictional. They are not. This is human drama, and it is real. Fan resists the urge to embellish and simply allows them to unfold in front of your eyes…

da qui