Wang Bing calls his new films about Chinese garment workers the “Youth” trilogy for good reason: Most of the people shown clocking marathon hours at sewing machines are barely in their 20s. Maybe that’s why the concrete buildings where they both work and live can feel like dystopian dorms. The men and women split their time largely between cluttered workshops downstairs and bunkrooms upstairsjb casino, where they trade war stories of long hours, short wages and bad bosses.
It’s a story as old as time, or industrialization, which may be why the English title of the trilogy’s second entry, “Youth (Hard Times),” evokes Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel set in a mill town. Wang’s nearly four-hour documentary depicts the migrants who trek to these streets of Zhili in the district of Huzhou City and earn “bitter money” (to borrow the title of an earlier Wang film). To watch them toil away despite thankless conditions is to admire their resilience but also feel their time being lost.
“Youth (Hard Times)” leans into the obstacles thrown at workers and how, despite iron nerves and late nights, the house always wins. Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation.
Some tales are mundane but maddening: A man is pushed to work faster with a broken machine. Others combine the ache of short fiction and the brutality of a police report: A slender young man fumes to friends about getting locked up in a police station over a wage dispute, and then his boss stiffs him when his “pay book” (logging his hours) goes missing.
Wang’s camerawork feels keen, even personal. Often we hustle along the buildings’ open-air terraces, which lend a theatrical sense of everybody being in everybody else’s business. Days blur into nights — the workrooms don’t seem to have much sunlight — and Wang follows the workers’ youthful energies and comings and goings, which set the film’s pace over the machine-gun chatter of sewing desks. In one workshop, one man starts working shirtless, prompting someone to quip, “That’s a bit sexy.”
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