The middle part of a trilogy comprising 2023’s “Youth (Spring)” and the upcoming “Youth (Homecoming),” “Youth (Hard Times)” crystallizes the strengths of Wang Bing’s latest epic-length documentary. “Hard Times” offers no radical change from the (quite deliberately) repetitive construction of “Spring,” but it does feature subtle shifts in focus and certainly many more incidents and splinter effects. That’s not to say there’s now a shortage of sequences of people humming along to music on their phones while they work—the most surprising pinprick of the year might be that a stern arthouse documentary includes an electronic track that appears to sample The Offspring’s “Original Prankster.”
First, an introduction for those who are not yet familiar with the project. Slowness and the viewer’s awareness of a deceptively aimless pace are perhaps the defining characteristics of Wang’s works. He delves into the lives of his protagonists, sometimes over several years, and roams the space of a community with his camera to convey the rhythm of a particular way of life on film. His documentaries are purely observational works that ultimately bring to light some of the most difficult truths about China’s past and present.
With the “Youth” cycle, shot between 2014 and 2019, Wang and several other cinematographers entered the world of textile workshops in Zhili, a town in Huzhou’s Wuxing district. Zhili is one of the country’s main sites of privately run sweatshops, with most of the cramped offices and dormitories seen in the film located along Happiness Road. This name is an ironic gag; another punchline comes each time on-screen text delineates each space, only to then witness an almost total absence of perceptible differences between locations.
Almost all of the employees are economic migrants from nearby Anhui province, working in brutal conditions and constrained by the stress and demands of constant, monotonous work to provide the bare minimum of life’s necessities. Yet the largely young workers – most of those we meet are in their teens and twenties – manage to establish a social life and moments of spontaneous contact during 15-hour shifts sewing clothes and running machines whose humming sounds compete for space on the soundtrack with the pop music blaring from phones.
In contrast to the slow pace of both films, the workers must ensure they can sew as quickly as possible in order to earn higher wages (they receive only paltry wages per piece completed). Children fool around, flirt, argue, philosophize, and bicker with their various coworkers and love interests. While the names, ages, and hometowns of many of the workers appear onscreen, Wang tracks them as a collective rather than as explicit protagonists, though some individuals certainly get a little more attention as he jumps freely between shops—some of whom return for the sequel, and presumably will again in the third installment.
In Spring, Wang focused a little more on the social aspect of these environments, although the first negotiations with the bosses for better wages didn’t take place until about 90 minutes into the three-and-a-half-hour film. The 227-minute film Hard Times, which is mostly set in 2015 in the run-up to the New Year, focuses on the material conditions that keep the workshop world alive. Unlike the name of Happiness Road, Hard Times is definitely not an ironic title.
From the start, there are more fights for better pay. A young man gets into a physical altercation with management after losing his notebook, in which he records his hours and days worked. The boss has not made backup copies for any of his employees and will not accept the boy’s cell phone photos of his records. The teenager will not get the salary that the boss actually owes him unless he can find the pay book and hand it over to him.
Children turn up in sweatshops because both parents work there and have no way to provide child care. A group of workers watch from high in a concrete complex as their debt-ridden boss and his family beat up a delivery man on the street below. Some stores suddenly close when the owners flee the city with money and documents, setting the stage for financial and housing crises. The landlord who oversees the run-down dorms does nothing to help those who have been cheated by management, but runs away, robbing the workers of the fruits of their labor. Not that they haven’t been robbed before.
The loss of dignity is a recurring theme in the stories of Hard Times, although some characters regain at least some degree of control over how their struggles are documented. In a few rare cases, the remaining divide between Wang (and his fellow cameramen) and the workers is breached. There are some very brief exchanges between the observed and the observer, and one laugh-out-loud-worthy moment is when one person in a lively group meeting turns around, notices the camera is there, and says, “Shit, don’t film that!”
Whether Wang himself was behind the handheld camera in this particular case (or one of his five other cameramen), the inclusion of a particular fourth-wall break comes across as the director poking fun at himself and any criticism of his typical approach to wandering. While slowly following an elderly gentleman up the concrete stairs at night (“Hard Times” shows a whole bunch of other forty-somethings working in the shops), the camera pauses as the protagonist turns around and says, “You should film the workshop. They’re not working right now… trying to work out a deal with the boss.”
The group discussion below was actually captured by a different camera, but this interaction provides a bit of welcome relief amid the grim proceedings. As the purely observational barrier disappears in moments like these, one wonders if and how “Homecoming” — the final (and shortest!) installment in Wang’s rich, compelling series — will tweak the formula a little further.
Grade: B+
“Youth (Hard Times)” premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival. Icarus Films will distribute the film in North America.
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