‘Youth (Homecoming)’ Review: Wang Bing’s 10-Hour Doc Trilogy Disappoints in its Closing Workshop Saga | Venice

Wang Bing’s mammoth Youth documentary trilogy chronicles the lives of migrant workers in Zhili, China, garment sweatshops from 2014 to 2019. The films provide a true fly-on-the-wall experience, patiently observing the goings-on inside squalid workshops and dormitories. Wang’s dogged and resolute commitment is demanded of the viewers as well – repeatedly. The trilogy culls some whopping 9 hours and 53 minutes in total from 2,600 hours of raw footage. As admirable an undertaking as this is for Wang and his enthusiasts alike, can this kind of investment and devotion be justified for the casual moviegoer? 

The much lauded 3-hour-and-35-minute Youth (Spring) – a 2023 Cannes Film Festival selection – depicts, among other things, a worker struggling to get time off for an abortion. The 3-hour-and 46-minute Youth (Hard Times) – which recently debuted at the Locarno Film Festival – gets more polemic and highlights workers organizing and bargaining with fly-by-night employers.  

The 2-hour-and-32-minute Youth (Homecoming), which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, is about workers coping with logistics of the Lunar New Year holiday travels. It’s the Chinese equivalent of Thanksgiving and Christmas, except no such thing as the holiday spirit exists in Zhili. Some workers can’t scrape together the funds for a trip home thanks to getting stiffed by their heartless employers. The lucky ones who do get to return to Anhui, Yunnan and other god-forsaken provinces with no indoor plumbing must put up with narcissistic parents and/or seize the once-a-year window of opportunity to get hitched.  

Wang also explores the word “homecoming” in an abstract, loose sense, such as workers finding love in a hopeless place – like Zhili – where emotionally infantized Chinese men and women, well into their 30s and living in co-ed dormitories, still roughhouse with the opposite sex as a way to flirt and signal romantic interest and where toxic newlyweds endlessly scold and disparage each other.  

With the cat now fully out of the bag, we can confidently say the three films take place contemporaneously. The footage has been organized by themes for the most part, though there’s some overlapping. Some subjects and sweatshops may have recurred in different films, though don’t quote me on it. Wang has aimed for a broad-stroke statement about a way of life, but the result is mostly impersonal despite the full access the subjects provided. The films just don’t spend enough time with any of them individually for the whole project to not feel surficial. 

It’s no fault of Wang’s per se that the English lower thirds displaying the names, ages and home provinces of the subjects flash on the screen for mere seconds, not long enough for anyone to commit to short-term memory or jot down during a press screening. If this Asian critic still struggles to tell the trilogy’s various subjects apart after spending nearly 10 hours with the material, it’s highly doubtful others can do better. Films like these just unwittingly feed into the all-Asians-look-alike discourse. Those who are unbothered by it need to do some serious soul searching regarding how they really feel about the Chinese as individuals as opposed to collective stereotypes. 

Come to think of it, Youth seems to resonate with critics precisely because it fits squarely into the acceptable narratives on China in the West: communism epic fail thanks to . . . capitalism? This trilogy is a France/Luxembourg/Netherlands production, with participation from the likes of Arte France, Eurimages and Film Fund Luxembourg. You won’t ever see those European institutions bankrolling documentaries about the 27,960-mile bullet train network in China, just as you won’t likely see a white documentarian given the wherewithal to spend five years embedding with working Americans who live out of their cars. Can we please just acknowledge the unconscious bias involved in surfacing and lauding the kind of discourse seen in Youth? The only thing remotely radical about it is the fact that garment work in China isn’t gendered, unlike in the West. 

The sense of authenticity in the Youth trilogy is strong, perhaps blindingly so. The verité cinematography – with six cinematographers credited – is amazing. Workers and sweatshop owners do not seem in the least embarrassed about their cluttered living quarters, dubious business practices and trash-strewn streets on open display in not one but three movies. You also appreciate Wang including moments of subjects breaking the fourth wall and calling out the presence of the film crew. But you know he is capable of manipulating viewers, because you notice a cut in Spring or Hard Times where the supposedly diegetic music is somehow uninterrupted before and after the edit. Thankfully, there is nothing potentially underhanded like that noticeable in Homecoming. 

The trilogy has peaked with Hard Times, because that installment truly drives home some sense of urgency and what’s at stake. Homecoming is not nearly as successful by comparison. The vignettes of the workers back home definitely add another much-appreciated dimension to the trilogy; but once Wang exhausts that narrative, his poetic pivot to couples adjusting just feels indiscriminate and flippant. The best part about Homecoming is that Wang is at last conducting actual interviews. See, providing some much-needed context in a documentary isn’t so hard after all, is it?

Grade: C

This review is from the Venice Film Festival. Icarus Films will release Youth (Homecoming) in the U.S.