Zhang has just moved back home after studying abroad and it is super-awkward. Her mother constantly reminds her filmmaker daughter how much the family spent on her education, when she is not belittling her father. As we glean from Zhang’s conversations with him, he made a play to become a tycoon in the mid-1990s, but failed due to a combination of bad luck, corruption, and/or insufficient insider contacts. Nevertheless, she seems to have the greatest rapport with him out of all her immediate family.
Long Journey Home is just over two hours, but not a lot of earth-shattering events happens, except an awful lot of arguing about money. Technically, it does not address the annual mass-migration of migrant Chinese workers to their countryside homes for Chinese New Year documented in Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home, but the echoes are likely intentional. We definitely get the sense Zhang has traveled from an even greater distance mentally for her somewhat strained homecoming.
