‘Youth’ Review: Wang Bing’s Cannes Doc Explores Young Chinese Workers

Check the label on that garment hanging in your closet. If it reads “Made in China,” there’s a chance it was stitched together by one of the characters in Wang Bing’s documentary Youth (Spring), or someone like them.

Youth (Spring) – one of two documentaries admitted into main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, which hadn’t welcomed a documentary into that prestige category in almost 20 years – was filmed over a five-year period in China’s Zhili City, known as the country’s capital of clothing manufacture. Every year young people from rural areas in Anhui and other provinces pour into the urban center looking for work. Thousands of privately owned garment “workshops” stand ready to employ them, or perhaps we should say exploit them.

Wang’s hand-held camera goes inside the cluttered, fluorescent-lit workshops where young men and women sew garments at a furious pace, their fingers pushing cloth through sewing machines so quickly you could swear the filmmaker sped up the video. It’s piece work, so the faster you can crank through a pair of polar fleece pants or a girl’s party dress, the better.

At night the workers retire to company-owned “dormitories” – grimy dwellings with all the charm of a flophouse. It’s a shared bathroom situation – drawback! – but on the plus side, each occupant is generously furnished with a plastic basin that can be used to soak tired feet or scrub dirty clothes. They eat meals on the fly out of throwaway containers.

Despite how it may sound, Youth’s purpose isn’t to expose abuse in the clothing trade (although it may make you deeply skeptical next time you go shopping and spot a Made in China jacket, say, selling for a suspiciously cheap price). Wang’s intent is more subtly sociological – Youth explores the connections and even culture, in a sense, that can develop among people thrown together in arduous circumstances.

The teenagers and 20-somethings who mostly populate Youth retain a surprising degree of vitality in circumstances that you might think would grind them to a nub. They’re so inured to the work that even as the machines chew cloth with chattering fury, they maintain lively conversations amongst themselves. There’s a lot horsing around, and the banter between the young women and men veers towards sexual subtext. One young woman tells an infatuated co-worker he’s not her type and fends of his amorous entreaties (she’s concerned that he hasn’t had a real girlfriend before and may be a virgin). But, surprisingly, they wind up negotiating a possible marriage. Love, in this hardscrabble environment, seems to possess all the romance of a business transaction.

Economic pressures completely circumscribe the lives of the characters in Youth. Multiple scenes in the three-and-a-half-hour-long film show workers strategizing over how to get a few pennies more per garment out of “the boss.” The rates range from 5 to maybe 12 Yuan per piece, or roughly 70 cents to $1.40 at today’s exchange rate (the documentary was filmed between 2014-2019, so it’s hard to say what that translated to in dollars over that timeframe).

One scene underscores how the primacy of business interests impacts the lives of young people in the film. After a young factory worker becomes pregnant, her mother meets with an overseer who tells her the teenager must complete her quota of garments before she can take time off. The boss recommends the girl get an abortion to make matters easier.

“So, you will get rid of the baby?” the boss asks the woman. She replies meekly, “Yes.”

Youth adopts a neutral, observant posture towards its subjects. It isn’t passing judgment either on the young people in it or the system which needs their labor, but at the cheapest price possible. It’s not a film that seeks out self-consciously beautiful images – no shots of the moon reflected in the gutter, or the like – “no aesthetic or dramatic touches added,” as the Cannes program puts it. The festival notes that Wang is currently editing a sequel and that the finished project may run to nine hours in length.

That running time isn’t out of the norm for Wang, perhaps the leading documentarian based in China (the brilliant Chinese-born nonfiction filmmaker Nanfu Wang lives in New Jersey). His 2018 documentary Dead Souls, also a Cannes premiere, weighed in at more than eight hours; Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, released in the U.S. in 2007, measured more than nine hours.

Youth (Spring) is one of two documentaries the filmmaker is unveiling in Cannes this year. Man in Black, which runs a mere 60 minutes, tells the story of Wang Xilin, the 86-year-old composer considered one of China’s most important classical artists. “During the Cultural Revolution,” Cannes notes, “he was the target of severe persecution, enduring beatings, imprisonment and torture.”

In his work, Wang is telling the history of his country from the 1950s onward, with an engaged but dispassionate eye (any more activist tone to his films would probably get him banned). West of the Tracks documented a period in China when it was transitioning from a state-managed economy to one where free enterprise reigns (despite its ostensible claim to being a Communist nation). In Youth, we see where Chinese capitalism has led – to conditions that seem akin to Lowell, Mass. in the 19th century (also a textile manufacturing center where young workers lived in company-owned barracks while toiling in factories).

The title of the film must be considered as ironic, because even as these young people manage to eke out some fun, and maybe hook up or find a longer-term romantic relationship, this is no way to spend one’s youth.

Title: Youth (Spring)Festival: Cannes (Main Competition)Director: Wang BingScreenplay: Wang Bing

Running time: 212 min.Sales: Pyramid International

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