Youth (Spring) – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Youth (Spring) – first-look review

19 May 2023

Words by Caitlin Quinlan

Two young people, a boy and a girl, seated on stools and engaged in conversation in a workshop-like setting with various tools and equipment visible.
Two young people, a boy and a girl, seated on stools and engaged in conversation in a workshop-like setting with various tools and equipment visible.
The Chi­nese mas­ter of slow cin­e­ma cov­ers life in some of the coun­try’s 18,000 gar­ment fac­to­ries in this sprawl­ing but focused documentary.

In the films of Chi­nese direc­tor Wang Bing, pace, or more pre­cise­ly slow­ness, is per­haps his most not­ed for­mal device. Wang takes his time; he fol­lows com­mu­ni­ties for sev­er­al years, film­ing the rep­e­ti­tions of their lives, the mun­dan­i­ties, the trau­mas, and con­dens­es his find­ings into 200+ minute doc­u­men­taries that, though sparse, lay bare some of the harsh­est truths about China’s past and present.

Yet it’s the notion of speed that is per­haps most inter­est­ing in Wang’s first film for five years, and the first doc­u­men­tary to com­pete for the Palme d’Or since 2004. Broad in scope yet bril­liant­ly inci­sive, Youth (Spring) acts almost as a sequel to Wang’s 2016 film Bit­ter Mon­ey in its focus on mul­ti­ple tex­tile work­shops and their labour­ers in the out­skirts of a major Chi­nese city. Sev­er­al times dur­ing the film, work­ers remark on how quick­ly some­one is capa­ble of doing some­thing — stitch­ing seams togeth­er, count­ing mon­ey, even leap­ing across fur­ni­ture. These skills and the spaces in which they are enact­ed are inte­gral to the film’s land­scape; the work­ers ensure they can sew as fast as pos­si­ble to ensure job secu­ri­ty and to com­mand high­er pay­checks, hop­ing to even­tu­al­ly leave the dilap­i­dat­ed dor­mi­to­ries where they live. Wang roams the cor­ri­dors and bal­conies of the work­shops and the liv­ing quar­ters with his cam­era (slow­ly him­self, of course) to cap­ture the rhythms of this way of life in the mode of pure, unob­struct­ed obser­va­tion that has come to define his work.

Most of his cast, as the title sug­gests, are young peo­ple between the ages of 17 and 25 who have moved from their rur­al homes to work in the urban envi­ron­ment. They’ve expe­ri­enced their own unbal­anced sense of pace in life, forced to enter a chal­leng­ing adult­hood and mature far quick­er than they might like to. The relent­less churn of their work­load is unde­ni­able; life speeds away from them with every bun­dle of fab­ric they cut, sew and trim, as tufts of mate­r­i­al float through the air above their heads. In allow­ing such time to watch and con­sid­er this exis­tence, Wang seems to slow the world down for them in a ges­ture of grace. Yet, unlike some of his oth­er films where moments of lev­i­ty are hard to find, Youth is sound­tracked by the C‑pop they blast dur­ing work­ing hours and the near con­stant laugh­ter of the employ­ees as they flirt and play fight all day. The empha­sis placed on their roman­tic con­nec­tions, too, cre­ates space for a soft­er tone. 

Still, there is no attempt to mask the sheer toil of the work­ers and one par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing scene that doc­u­ments an aggres­sive fight between two employ­ees is an abrupt reminder of the ten­sion and stress that imbues this envi­ron­ment. There are con­ver­sa­tions about break-ups and abor­tions, signs that the mon­ey is sim­ply not there to do what many of them desire like rais­ing a fam­i­ly or buy­ing a house. The most invig­o­rat­ing of the film’s focus­es is the col­lec­tive organ­is­ing between work­ers that occurs in sev­er­al of the fac­to­ries as they demand bet­ter wages from their boss­es. Yet here there is a whiplash, too, as siloes emerge and indi­vid­u­als nego­ti­ate bet­ter deals for them­selves, leav­ing oth­ers behind.

Wang remains a ded­i­cat­ed doc­u­men­tar­i­an and though the dura­tion of his work can seem a chal­lenge, it allows for such immer­sion into a sub­ject, such rich­ness in por­trai­ture. Oper­at­ing out­side of China’s film indus­try allows his film­mak­ing to be polit­i­cal­ly sub­ver­sive even as he prefers to lim­it his own pres­ence and fore­ground the real­i­ties of oth­ers. In this way, he con­tin­ues to craft com­pelling ethno­gra­phies of his coun­try through the voic­es and labour of its peo­ple, and the sim­ple act of watching.

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