TIFF '24: Wang Bing completes the "Youth" Trilogy

by Cláudio Alves

YOUTH (HARD TIMES) won a special mention at Locarno, the Junior Jury and FIPRESCI prizes.

Last year, Wang Bing presented Youth (Spring) at TIFF after the film's world premiere in competition at Cannes. It was to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one of a magnitude that's impressive even for such a grand muralist as the director is known to be. His filmography is full of works documenting the Chinese dispossessed, often curious about the labor forces whose strenuous efforts make the national economy work its exploitative, feverishly expansionist dream. For Youth, he focused his camera on the greener workers, a new generation consigned to a life of unfair garment labor, struggling to survive within the putative economic boom of modern China. Wang shot it between 2014 and 2019, dividing his findings between three films that collectively amount to a nearly ten-hour-runtime. 

At The Film Experience, we've already gone over Spring, so it's time to tackle Hard Times – competition in Locarno – and Homecoming – an erstwhile Golden Lion contender from Venice. The cumulative effect of these three monuments of cinema cannot be overstated…

YOUTH (HARD TIMES), Wang Bing

It's challenging to write about the work of Wang Bing without falling into cycles of repetition. The situation gets trickier when considering such a tightly bound project as the Youth trilogy. Perfected over many years, the director's technique consists of fly-on-the-wall observation, presenting images that proudly bear a badge of authenticity and promise unmediated footage. There are no talking-head interviews here, and if the subjects acknowledge the camera, it's a brief stumble in the everyday many-year march of Youth. Spring was like that, following in the steps of 2016's Bitter Money to capture the lives of migrant workers in the city of Zhili, where 18,000 privately run workshops employ around 300,000 souls. 

Hard Times is a continuation and a deepening, playing with the same register in granular variation. For all that Spring emphasized the mind-numbing repetition and untenable working conditions of its titular youths, it also found space for bright spots of optimism, often in the form of camaraderie and sparks of romance. Its chronology was also hard to parse, leading to a viewing experience where time seemed to lose its shape. Trapped in a Sisyphean cycle, the workshop interior and adjacent dormitories existed in a decontextualized limbo. The second film starts similarly, but things take a turn a few hours in. For starters, the six-year scope of the shoot becomes apparent, viscerally so. 

Individual figures age. Some are forced to part with hope along the way, a process that leaves its mark. The workspace also shows signs of evolution, maybe de-evolution, as the already exploitative present tense becomes even more so. Gradually, whatever free room there was vanishes. Cluttered and suffocating, the workshop can distort the very notions of time, twist it with its windowless rooms and sallow lighting until it's impossible to tell if it's night or day. By making us more aware of time this go-round, Wang Bing's edit also forces the viewer to acknowledge when that same property loses sense and tangible meaning. It's both a gesture to promote awareness, a broader context, and a powerful shot of disorientation. 

But Hard Times is more than just a temporal experiment on the standard set by Spring. The spiraling discomfort naturally leads to surges of on-screen discontent, even outrage. Paying disputes arise where passive resignation once reigned, and whispers of state-sponsored repression abound. Initially, it's just an offhand comment or a pointed fury during an especially heated altercation. Three hours in, however, Wang Bing breaks format and lets one of his subjects tell a story directly to the camera, doing away with the invisible documenter approach that defines so much of his cinema. Huddled in the dark, only illuminated by his open laptop, a young man speaks of police brutality, going into detail yet never acting as if what he's saying is, in any way, shocking.

The viewer can't help but realize that the violence detailed is a matter of everyday life for the youths in front of the camera, all-watching yet powerless. What's off-screen comes onto it through oblique means, and one can't pretend it isn't there anymore. Within Wang's opus, this amounts to a startling form of disruption and a necessary realization that undoubtedly contributed to the director's relatively recent blacklisting in China. But that's not the only schism that occurs when Hard Times approaches the finish line. As some workers return to their hometowns for a short while, Youth expands past the workshop and the limits of Zhili's labyrinthian grey slabs and black tar streams. From spring to summer, fleeting over autumn to arrive at an unforgiving, oddly comforting, winter. 

There's a musical interlude in the journey, a sweet sentimental tune that wonders fatalistically about a lost love. But perhaps the guitarist is thinking of the youth he is actively losing. Whatever the case, the pain in the song doesn't invalidate how fresh it feels in the sewing machine concerto of Hard Times. Moreover, the geographic movement allows the image to expand and to glimpse the open sky and mountains far away. This rurality is a relief after the claustrophobic quality of the previous three hours, no matter the poor living conditions depicted. Even the smoky shacks illuminated by fire and splinters of sunlight feel like a necessary and welcome reprieve. At the end of a journey that's only two-thirds over, the return home reads like the epilogue in a long literary epic. Or, perchance, the start of a different movie. Well…

YOUTH (HOMECOMING), Wang Bing

You would think Homecoming would follow directly from Hard Times' rural divagation, yet Wang Bing opens the third and final installment of Youth by placing the viewer back in the workshop. Everything is slowing down as the new year approaches, yet some unfortunate workers still toil away, cutting long swaths of denim that will one day be sewn into jeans. For once, the ubiquitous sound of the sewing machine is absent, a soothing silence in its place. Well, soothing might be an exaggeration, for the quiet has its own oppressive force. More than anything, this structural choice by Wang makes it clear that the director isn't moving through his footage according to its actual chronology. He jumps around, contracts years, and concentrates moments thematically.

If Hard Times was about feeling time, Homecoming is about forgetting it again, dreaming aimlessly, only to be rudely reminded by the picture's close. Also, for the first time in the trilogy, Wang has limited the breadth of his collective portraiture, choosing to consider the countless works before his camera in relation to a pair of youths returning to their respective hometowns for a couple of weddings – their own. Along with seasonal celebrations that follow ancient rite, the doubled nuptials serve as an injection of vitality into Homecoming and a strong structuring force. That's maybe why this third chapter feels the least diffuse of the Youth tryptic, clocking the saga's shortest runtime at a paltry 152 minutes.

That sense of focus, that visual variety provided by the rural celebrations, is bolstered by a renewed purpose in Wang Bing's image-making. Though forever unobtrusive, the director's audiovisual style isn't defined by self-effacement or aesthetic abnegation. Just looking at how he shoots the train rides away from Zhili and into the Chinese countryside shows an unusual care in depicting a constricted space full of people, the negotiation of crammed bodies looking for comfort in a profoundly uncomfortable setting. Though limited to a rigid placement by virtue of filming inside an actual overcrowded train, Wang finds ways to give his compositions some dynamism. He guides the eye toward blushes and brushes of human connection hiding within the cramped stillness.

Back home, some of his most haunting images manage to say what a thousand words could not, bringing the despair of the workshop into a new environment, like a curse that never leaves the garment laborers. Consider a young man singing to himself on top of the stairs. It's such a striking shot, his wild hair creating a strong silhouette while the glare of the phone, the only source of light, makes his face readable and ghostly white. Every line in the frame corroborates a sense of concentric loneliness, as if he were a black hole. Moreover, what the camera reveals isn't an invisible truth. Through the words of village elders and older relatives, Homecoming shows how other generations perceive the young's misery, wasting their lives within a system that cares naught for the worker and will destroy them all.

In a sharp echo, two couples playact the same motion. One is in the country and full wedding regalia, encircled by family and friends dressed in bright costumes that practically vibrates off a screen so used to gradations of gray and dirty white fluorescent lights. The other wanders the streets of Zhili at night, after a whole day looking for elusive work. In both cases, the woman asks her paramour for a piggyback ride, yet only one of those instances possesses the possibility of hope. The other is despair defined, a paroxysm of exhaustion. Two couples found love in a hopeless place, but only one kind of environment permits that bond to blossom into something worthwhile. And it's not the metropolis of industry.

That said, Wang Bing isn't some pastoralist, contrasting the urbane hell against an idealized rural paradise. Perpetually lucid in his observations, the director is quick to show the abject poverty that drove the young people away from their rural origins. Still, he further finds time and compassion to eulogize what makes them come back. In some ways, he even suggests a horrible notion – that the factory work has consumed the younger generation so totally that their workshop is home, making the sorrowful return at the end of Youth its titular homecoming. There are no moral binaries or proffered solutions in the trilogy, merely the recording of lives and their presentation as something too poetic to be journalism, and so raw it feels realer than most documentary projects.

Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming) played in the Wavelengths section at TIFF. They'll next be featured in the NYFF.