‘Youth (Homecoming)’: Venice Review

Dir. Wang Bing. France/Luxembourg/Netherland. 2024. 152mins 

It’s enterprise as standard within the workshops of Zhili in Youth (Homecoming), the ultimate a part of Wang Bing’s epic documentary trilogy concerning the Chinese language garment commerce at its most elementary industrial degree. Cost is unsure, residing situations greater than spartan, and a military of younger employees face a worrying future. The distinction on this episode is that topics get to spend extra time away visiting with their households – though the English title is ambiguous, since folks all the time appear to return to the Zhili shopfloors, as if that was the actual dwelling they will by no means escape.

Wang’s brutally revealing trilogy presents a difficult assertion about working-class life

Shot between 2014 and 2019, the exhaustive Youth undertaking, operating almost 10 hours in complete, concludes with the Venice Competitors premiere of Homecoming, following chapters Spring (Cannes, 2023) and Exhausting Occasions (Locarno, 2024). Total, the trilogy should stand as a monument in modern documentary, and can be a lot mentioned by historians of the shape – though the rigorous and intentionally repetitive, even monotonous parts of the undertaking would require devoted viewers to indicate a endurance to match that of Wang and his crew. 

The place Exhausting Occasions targeted on fee points and the Zhili workforce as a collective, Homecoming very a lot permits people and {couples} to step into the highlight, rising as absolutely rounded figures away from the crushing surroundings of the workshops. The movie’s lengthy central part reveals a lot of employees returning dwelling to completely different areas of the nation to have a good time Chinese language New 12 months. A younger lady named Dong Minyan and her husband Mu Fei, each from China’s southwestern Yunnan province, are seen travelling on a prepare with corridors as cramped because the office they’ve left; en route, we sense their exhaustion.

We then meet Mu Fei’s father, lately identified with TB, and mom, who breaks down in entrance of the digital camera, deeply distressed by the well being and cash issues the household face, in what’s arguably essentially the most immediately emotive passage within the trilogy. Dong Minyan herself additionally talks on to the individual behind the digital camera, confessing her personal despair; away from the crowds and corridors of Zhili, this episode actually permits its topics to open up.

Different sequences are extra joyous, notably the marriage procession of one other younger couple full with fireworks and uproarious bursts of froth spray, and a New 12 months ceremony in Anhui province (the caption paradoxically notes ‘New 12 months 2016 – Feast of the God of Prosperity’). Elsewhere, in a city close to the Yangtze river, a household is seen eating underneath a outstanding, and centrally positioned, picture of Chairman Mao, one of many solely sequences within the trilogy the place Wang is immediately prompting us to consider the legacy of China’s fashionable historical past.

The social gathering is over following the marriage banquet of one other lady, Fang Lingping, whose husband accompanies her again to Zhili and himself enlists as a clothes employee, struggling to be taught the methods of manufacturing (the stresses between him and his more proficient spouse quickly turning into evident). On this final hour of the movie, we’re again within the acquainted, miserable metropolis as a brand new younger technology arrive searching for work: we rapidly see their youthful excessive spirits subside because the movie’s cyclical construction reasserts itself, echoing the relentless grind of Zhili’s soul-crushing equipment. 

There’s little or no overt commentary within the trilogy, apart from laments from employees and their households concerning the issue of staying afloat. The West could select to see Asia’s sweatshops as a particular case located in a world aside. However Wang’s brutally revealing trilogy presents a difficult assertion about working-class life, city and rural, and urges us to consider financial exploitation and the character of labour within the globalised world.