The conditions under which Chinese clothing workers toil makes for an intense 3 1/2 hour documentary that is at once gripping and repetitive in Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring).
Some 100 miles from Shanghai stands the city of Zhili, known as the center of the Chinese children’s clothing, an industry valued at US $47 billion. Yet as we learn from Youth (Spring), the city’s workshops brim over with young men and women in their twenties working overtime for very little pay. This exhaustive portrait of a slice of Chinese society dives deep into the underbelly of capitalism, probably a lot deeper than most audiences will want to follow. Those who do make the journey will certainly thing twice about buying cheap made-in-China wear as they remember the fun-loving, overworked youth in this film.
Five years in the making, the film suffered a further setback from Covid, to finally debut in competition at Cannes. Noted documaker Wang Bing, who comes from the north of China, has previously explored the country’s northeast industrial complex in his first film, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) and the northwest in The Ditch (2002), about the Chinese imprisoned in a forced labor camp in the Gobi Desert under Mao Zedong. Here he immersed himself in the unfamiliar culture and dialects of provinces along the Yangtsé River, from where much of Zhili’s labor force comes.
The city itself is never seen in the film: no drone shots or panoramas from high buildings, no drives through the city center. The only parts of Zhili that we see are the long blocks of concrete eyesores that line a wide, dirty, garbage-strewn street. These functional structures house textile workshops on the lower floors and dormitories on the upper areas, which are reached by external staircases. So the audience’s field of vision is restricted to what the protagonists are seeing most of the time, with its innate claustrophobia.
The cast of characters is sprawling and individual names are soon forgotten as the camera draws in more and more of the young seamsters and seamstresses. The crowded workshops, littered with fabric remnants and lit by neon tubing, are a tough place to make a living, and the workers drive their aging sewing machines at breakneck speed to meet their quotas and earn more (they are paid by the piece). There is a constant din of ear-splitting machinery noise and voices screaming to make themselves heard over it, when not drowned out by pop music blaring from someone’s cell phone.
And yet this is not quite the portrait of hell one might suppose, because of one thing: the ceaseless banter and laughter that the young workers exchange, a sign of their surprising camaraderie. Part of their closeness may come from the shared dormitories where everyone mingles in relaxed co-living and where relationships develop into marriages, romances, pregnancies. At times parents turn up to sort out their children’s future, and to negotiate leaves of absence with the workshop manager. What clearly emerges is these young people’s seemingly universal dream of having enough money to get married, buy a home and start a family.
Above all, Wang Bing’s constantly moving camera communicates the great sense of innocent fun that bursts out on all occasions in jokes and pranks. Though most are in their twenties, they often seem like small kids who pinch each other, have food fights, and chase one another over tabletops and bunk beds. Only once does anger prevail and a real fight threaten to break out.
Half-way into the film, the talk turns to money and the tone shifts substantially. A seamstress takes the lead in organizing the bashful workers and demanding more pay, basically a ten-cent increase per garment. Two different workshop managers are shown negotiating with their respective work forces, though as the film reaches its 3-hour mark, many viewers will believe that one example would have been representative enough. However, these sequences do shed light on the non-unionized bargaining power of workers in China and have sociological interest.
Over the five years that film was shot, the director and his crew became familiar faces in the Zhili workshops, and their presence is almost never remarked on by the people they are shooting. The handheld camera discreetly trails its subjects from behind. Once, a boy turns to the camera and suggests “it’s better to film over there, it’s real life,” but this joke passes quietly.
The cinematographers use the ugly indoor ambient lighting to underline the harshness of the workshop, but once the subjects are on staircases and balconies, natural light washes away the lingering feeling of heat and grime. Wang Bing reserves a surprise for the very last scene, in which the refreshing greenery of nature at last appears, as the camera follows three characters walking along the river through a rain-soaked countryside where fruit is ripening on the trees. It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast to what has gone before, and leaves the viewer wondering.
Director: Wang Bing
Producers: Sonia Buchman, Mao Hui, Nicholas R. de la Mothe, Vincent Wang
Co-producers: Gilles Chanial, Denis Vaslin, Fleur Knopperts, Wang Jia, Qiao Cui
Executive producer: Wang Yang
Cinematography: Maeda Yoshitaka, Shan Xiaohui, Song Yang, Liu Xianhui, Ding Bihan, Wang Bing
Editing: Dominique Auvray, Xu Bing
Sound: Ranko Paukovic
Production companies: House on Fire, Gladys Glover & CS Production
World sales: Pyramid International
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Mandarin and Chinese dialects
212 minutes
