After a week of sweltering, immovable heat, a sheet of day-long rain hit Venice on the second to last night of films. On the way to see Wang Bing’s final instalment in his trilogy of documentaries, I waded through ankle-deep puddles, my hair standing in uneven spikes – it was an oddly appropriate way to encounter Youth (Homecoming), the story of textile workers in the Zhili province of northern China across 5 frigid winters (2014-2019). Part of the documentarian’s job is to express the texture of a world, even at the expense of a narrative. By this metric, Bing succeeds, making the lived experience of his subjects unbearably tangible. The coldness of these cement work rooms, of these dorm buildings, sits like an object at the centre of every frame, it seeps beneath the coats each person wears to work, to gamble, to bed; ice plastering their skin. For the first time in 10 days, I remembered what that felt like and shivered in a soaked t-shirt.
All of the people Bing follows across these 160 minutes are migrants, making a living through their work in this industrial city while longing for their more rural family homes. They chat, joke and complain, their resting pulse matching the beat of the sewing machines. For a leisurely film, the scenes on the factory floors are characterised by frenetic energy, the drill of the needles are all a blur, fluid in the patterns they sketch repeatedly at a break-neck speed. It is a wondrously insightful dilution of a generation caught on the periphery of industrialisation – almost every person Bing introduces us to is highly proficient and entirely disconnected from their work.
In the film’s opening moments, a young man sits upright at his workstation, receives a call that the day’s quota is higher than expected, and then collapses back on a previously unseen sea of unremarkable fabric in exasperation. It is a playful way for Bing to express a tragic truth: despite the fact that globalisation allegedly offers more opportunity than ever before, productivity beats intentionality, and quality is sacrificed to quantity. As a result, Youth (Homecoming) feel somewhat like The Office by way of Lars Von Trier, deeply familiar discontent in a barely lit, unforgiving factory.
In his quest to stumble across moments of unpractised connection, Bing built a lovely structure for his film, which moves backwards through the stages in a relationship. Youth (Homecoming) spends its first hour following a married couple (Mu Fei and Dong Mingyan) who travel back to their homes, then dedicates its last act to various teenagers flirting over their sewing machines. In a lovely, extensive sequence, a new groom is tasked with giving his bride a piggyback across the rocky path carved into the side of a mountain. The newlyweds dip in and out of focus while Bing’s camera swims alongside cheering and jeering villagers, occasionally drowning in their zeal. Later, a different couple are roaming Zhili for work, she simply requests “piggyback” from him. He braces his knees, and she laces her arms around his shoulders. Even amidst monotony, there is connection so inherent that it feels absentminded in its utterance; these moments reveal Bing’s unique recipe, every shade of hope, matched by tangy bitterness.
After almost half a decade of conversations and observations, it is oddly lovely that Bing finds his conclusion far away from Zhili’s churning hub, tracing long winding threads to off-road villages. Youth (Homecoming) is about connection and conflict, a long-form homage to all the things that pushed us away from the family home and all the things that draw us back.
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