07/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Wang Bing completes his trilogy on young Chinese garment workers with possibly the most emotionally captivating of the three films

“I don’t wanna get me a big old loan / work them fingers to the bone.” So sings musician and actor Tom Waits on his song “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, and with that monosyllabic but poetic rhyming couplet, we can also conjure up the aura of Wang Bing’s Youth documentary trilogy, concerned as it is with lives emptied in favour of endless labour. With China’s current population exceeding 1.4 billion, it’s fully understandable how the country’s enduring “peasant values”, as Wang has spoken of, have evolved into a work ethic sustaining the mass production powering the economy. In lieu of automation or greater efficiency, 200,000 young migrant workers must make the trek from the rural provinces to Zhili, where they manufacture 85% of the country’s children’s clothing. So these films, culminating in Youth (Homecoming), which has premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, exhaustively document these very people “working their fingers to the bone” on chirruping industrial equipment, and its impact on their lives and souls.

Where the Cannes- and Locarno-premiering Youth (Spring) [+see also:
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film profile] mapped out the labyrinthine workshops and largely stuck to claustrophobic, interior shots, Homecoming inverts this, providing Wang’s subjects with respite from their toil as they reunite with their families over the winter break, until this moment of pause is cruelly curtailed again. Like his most acclaimed previous work, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, each of the three parts covers the same timespan (here, the years 2014-2019), but from slightly different angles, as opposed to the ten complete hours proceeding in a chronological, linear way; risking another analogy, this also makes Wang something of a high modernist akin to the writer William Faulkner, embracing a fractal approach to time and the succession of events.

Getting his subjects, among them the young to-be-weds Dong Minyang and Mu Fei, out of Zhili and on trains and buses to the Yunnan mountains and the banks of the Yangtze River, finally gives Wang an opportunity to share his gifts for pictorial splendour. Shot with a high depth of field on short-focal-length lenses, the expanses of the mountains and muggy, rain-soaked air as we follow the characters on foot and in transit are breathtaking, yet the hazardous terrain also communicates how little there is here and, despite its aesthetic grandeur, that the lack of opportunities for economic and social mobility would leave the youngsters facing even harder times. Wang is no sentimentalist, and thus some of the most beautifully shot wedding sequences since The Godfather are also neutered by the pessimism and fatalism of that film’s endgame.

The movie’s conclusion makes us realise the irony of its title, ultimately making it the saddest of the trilogy. Just as the workers live on site in poorly maintained dormitories during the season, the idea of “home” itself becomes gradually indivisible from the environs of Zhili. As the first two films conclude with codas in the provinces, here we’re back in whichever workshop the newlywed characters are assigned to, where their infant children must also be brought up. And the gestures towards worker power and informal unions, which might potentially allow the employees to take back control, are not referenced here. The grind continues, the merely young are now young and married, with dependents, and the condition of many in the country could not be more starkly rendered.

Youth (Homecoming) is a production by France, Luxembourg the Netherlands and China, staged by Gladys Glover Films, House on Fire, CS Production, ARTE France Cinéma, Le Fresnoy, Les Films Fauves and Volya Films. Its world sales are handled by Pyramide International.