Go See It: "Last Train Home"

Think your train's crowded? Try standing in line for five days just to board a train -- that's how bad the crowds are in the days leading up to the Lunar New Year for the 120 million-odd migrant workers who want to travel home for the holidays each year.

Lixin Fan's great documentary "Last Train Home" zeroes in on two such workers -- a married couple, living thousands of miles from their young son and daughter. That physical distance translates into an even greater emotional disconnect: The surly 17-year-old daughter becomes increasingly vocal about how much she resents her parents, with their brief annual visits and predictable lectures. And they're becoming increasingly panicked by her disinterest in her school, and her forays into the dead-end world of the factory. Somehow, amazingly, the filmmaker happens to convey both the enormous scale of China's migrant problems, and the intimacy of one family's drama.

In their own review of "Last Train Home," NPR cites the scholar Marshall Berman, who argued that the "great drama of modernity" is the way in which the world's citizens move from being defined by history "to subjects who struggle to define their own relationship to a world in which everything is changing."

Moments like that recur throughout this movie, but there is one explosive scene when it's perfectly encapsulated. The family is all gathered at home, in the village, and the daughter swears at her dad, saying he never cared about her, only about making money. It's a ridiculous, childish thing to say, but the father crosses the room and starts hitting her. Remarkably -- for clearly she is no longer a child, after all -- she starts hitting back. And then she looks straight into the camera and she screams, "You wanted to know what I was like -- well, this is the real me! Are you happy?!"

If that sounds like it's straight from the sets of Jerry Springer, be warned, it's far more real than that. Phenomenal film, but as I told a colleague, you'll leave feeling like you've been kicked in the gut.

"Last Train Home" is playing at the IFC and BAM Rose cinemas.