Analyzing a Wang Bing is never such a small feat, regardless of length; and Youth (Homecoming), the final entry in the director’s Youth trilogy, premiering at Venice following similar premieres for Hard Times (225 mins) and Spring (212 mins) at Locarno 2024 and Cannes 2023 respectively, is little different despite its comparatively brief 150-minute runtime. The nature of the task of criticism here is due in part to the reality that the viewer can now bring to bear something of an anatomical analysis of this latest documentary series from one of filmmaking’s most intractably principled and resolutely patient directors. Prior to the Youth series, Wang had last released work in Dead Souls (2018), an eight-hour long assessment of state abuses where he interviewed survivors of the Gobi Desert work camp Jianbiangou, where accused rightists were sent to die as they purportedly dug out paradise. Over the last two years, with the Youth series, the director has now released a nearly 10-hour long multi-part conceptual consideration of the seasons of life experienced by the young workers who occupy the workshops of the town of Zhili in Zhejiang province. In a mode distinct from the hyper-fixation of Dead Souls, and indeed Fengming and Beauty Lives in Freedom, with their rigid individualized memorialization, Spring, Hard Times, and Homecoming reflect a more activated, expansive record of a theoretic year or cycle in the lives of these workers that, ultimately, begins and ends, over the course of the three respective works, in these garment shops.
While Spring broadly sets about an introduction to the myriad faces and personalities in these shops after they have started their contracts following Chinese New Year (or Spring Festival) and studies their lives as they work, party, argue, and negotiate over pay up until the National Holiday week, Hard Times examines events and interests through the abstract view of the autumn and winter months as life and work each toughen and efforts at growth and change freeze over as agitation for better pay and conditions come to nought. By contrast, Homecoming presents the conclusion to all of this, as the workers once again wrap up work affairs, settle pay, and squabble with their partners over gambling habits, all with the ultimate goal (within the framework of the work Wang is crafting) of traversing the railways of the country to their hometowns for the Chinese New Year celebrations, the beginning of another year, and re-entry into this cycle of life.
In all of this, we see Wang and his team execute the by now familiar long-take style that records the monotony and repetition of the working hours, while also excitingly pursuing as needed an embedded handheld approach as the crew follows the migration of the subjects and their movements among the different daily or special affairs being carried out in their villages. Indeed, given the time spent with the youths across the series, it’s especially heartwarming when subjects seen previously show up in a new environment and the viewer is able to understand on a deeper level the inter-relations among these people and the ways in which they have and once again will navigate the thousands of miles between one place and another (e.g. there is a particularly jaw-dropping sequence that takes place on the unmarked dirt roads of a Yunnan mountainside which profoundly underscores how far the workers in question live from the work town near Shanghai). Yet, beyond this, Homecoming reifies in these disparate but clearly linked spaces the grand loop or rise and fall that the ancient fundaments of Chinese culture imagines the world to be defined by; employment and relationships are found, contracts and marriages made, holidays sanctioned and travels carried out, workplaces and families revisited — all of this has and will happen again, be it with the same or new faces, in a year past or a year to come.
Nevertheless, what is clear in the portraiture of life within Homecoming, and throughout the series, is the deep and abiding respect Wang has for the life on display as he records his subjects and the public sphere he and they each navigate. In terms of the principals, there is never a sense of denigration or lesser status due to social position, their existence here seen as a full one in all the joys and sorrows, pleasures and travails; being here is dignified and recorded not for examination or some kind of greater or lesser critique of policy and its effects. It’s a document of little thought-of life and its place in the whirr and whirl of the world; a witnessing of it all and what it activates in the viewer’s self-reflection of what respect is afforded to people who occupy the seams of a globalized economy. It’s in this that the importance of the work identifies itself in the nature of this respect as a mode of operation within the ethics of filmmaking on display. There is, as mentioned, the dignity afforded subjects, but as equally important are the frequent instances of members of the public rejecting and waving away the camera before it turns away and refocuses on more welcoming or indifferent participants. Wang’s interest and love for his country can, in this sense, be readily seen; no one site within it is unrelated to the rest, but instead all of it is inter-related and there to be commemorated so long as it is willing — art and life are here fully enmeshed, the director wholly aware that were this public not to exist, so to would his own work end.
Indeed, a further curious feature of the project is the fact that Wang is a clearer presence within the work itself, at times humorously (i.e. when he or another camera operator can be heard huffing and puffing after climbing some stairs) but in others more critically, as here Wang infrequently takes on the role of interviewer and commentator on life with his subjects. The comments and questions made are nearly exclusively mundane and, given the filming window between 2014-2019, by now utterly irrelevant; yet what is underscored is the absolute interest and fidelity Wang has to the people — this work is a work of love for these people, and one made out of absolute interest and concern for them.
If to read this leads one to think the project entirely inconsequential and irrelevant, this writer would humbly respond that it’s precisely the fact that Wang does not see things is way that makes him one of the most important filmmakers working today. Indeed, this importance is made all the more real and tangible through the fact that the director has now been effectively banned from returning to China following his passport’s expiration in France and his government’s unwillingness to renew it in the early years of the decade, while also more recently completely erasing his filmography from China’s Letterboxd-esque media logging and blogging website Douban and other sites. It speaks to something meaningful that one of the filmmaking world’s most alert and sensitive artists can receive this reaction by remaining close to the people. This posture alone is enough to recommend Homecoming and the rest of the Youth series to potential viewers. Yet in artistic terms, taken as a whole the Youth series matches the director’s magnum opus Tie Xi Qu for forensic analysis of workspaces and the economic realities of a place, while far outstripping it as a document of a people’s inner lives and a portrait of their place in a great circle of life, death, and rebirth. As Homecoming draws to a close, images of a group commemorating their ancestors during Qingming Festival (Tombsweeping Day) play before the film concludes on a solitary garment worker stitching away. In this cut across time and space, there is the palpable reminder that there is always the work to return to as concept and reality for the occupants of Zhili, but also perhaps a perspective on Wang’s self-understanding as filmmaker too. Near or far, he will always be one with these laborers cutting up and stitching together his own work with them, in his heart and on his mind, as the world continues its cycles around us all.
DIRECTOR: Wang Bing; DISTRIBUTOR: Icarus Films; IN THEATERS: November 8; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 32 min.
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