Wang Bing films have a reputation for their difficulty, but the opening film in his Youth trilogy, Youth (Spring), managed to be surprisingly varied and enjoyable despite consisting of 212 minutes of Chinese sweatshop workers struggling to get by. It was frequently exuberant and vivacious, a movie about young people flirting and arguing and having fun with one another despite the clear dreadfulness of their surroundings. The second entry, Youth (Hard Times), has a title that doesn’t make it seem like good times will be the focus, and the ever-present background issue in Spring of the factory workers trying to get better wages from management comes to the fore in the 226-minute Hard Times. (The final entry, Youth (Homecoming), is going to be substantially shorter at 160 minutes.)
None of the individual workers has ever made a particularly distinctive impression in either Youth film: they are usually introduced for the purposes of the scene in question and a miniature arc tends to play out over the course of a scene or two. Wang’s camera is acknowledged semi-regularly (including a “Fuck, don’t film this!”), making it something of a counterpoint to how the issue of a filmmaker potentially influencing discussions of labor and organizing would go unacknowledged in the films of a documentarian such as Frederick Wiseman. There is typically an overflow of audio caused by the sounds of people talking, the whirring machines, and people playing pop music on their phones without headphones (probably too expensive). It’s a collectivist approach, one where it doesn’t really matter what the young man who gets into a physical altercation over his wages being stolen is like as a person, because there are too many others like him. (The fact that he has all the evidence that he’s done his work, but it’s still not accepted because he lost the book with the information, is a particularly brutal act of petty cruelty that makes for an uncomfortable synecdoche.) One key scene near the three-hour mark finds an individual recapping a protest he took part in and was arrested for, lit entirely by the bland whiteness of a television screen whose noise threatens to drown out his story. Wang spent nearly six years filming the Youth films, and their reduction to about ten hours’ worth of material in total means that even with long takes and unadorned shooting, the material really was pared down to its most dramatically potent sequences, even when they are seemingly banal.
There’s more documentation of how difficult everything about this life is in Hard Times, from parents having to take their children to work with them because of a lack of childcare (their high-pitched voices clash with the low rumbles of the sewing machines), to an off-screen fight on the ground that the workers drolly comment upon from up high in the tenement apartments used for producing the garments. Their surroundings have arguably not beaten them down yet, but time keeps ticking, things aren’t getting any easier, and the management is becoming increasingly disinclined to pay the already-minuscule amount for the labor. The attempts to organize don’t build to any kind of culmination, and there’s no reason to expect that — Wang’s art is built out of anticlimaxes and carefully controlled monotony. Even the return to their hometowns for New Year’s celebrations, which echoes a similar conclusion in Spring, is a far more gloomy and rainy affair than its prior use. (Wang allows for the small mercy of a musical number on the bus ride thanks to one laborer also being a guitarist — it’s nice to see that even in such awful conditions, people try to maintain their own personal interests and hobbies when they can.) Homecoming being on the horizon seems to point toward greater optimism for the future, but in the grand tradition of trilogies reserving the darkest material for the middle entry, Hard Times is all about the organizing struggle, and it’s the kind of struggle that is ideally suited for durational extremes: over three and a half hours is an endurance test for most audiences; it’s a drop in the bucket for these people. If Spring was about the highs and lows of being young and broke, Hard Times is near-exclusively about the lows. But what comes across fiercely in both films is the fact that no one is stuck in a rut yet: not Wang’s ever watchful camera, and certainly not the people in front of it.
DIRECTOR: Wang Bing; DISTRIBUTOR: Icarus Films; IN THEATERS: November 1; RUNTIME: 3 hr. 46 min.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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