As the title indicates, Wang Bing’s
documentary Youth (Hard Times) paints a gloomier picture than the
preceding Youth (Spring), notwithstanding that both films run over three
and a half hours and are set almost entirely in the dingy textile workshops and
living quarters of Zhili (the closing captions tell us the city contains some
18,000 such businesses, employing 300,000 mostly young migrant workers); in
each case, the great length serves to release us from normal expectations of
pace and narrative, allowing at least a somewhat heightened sense of the
claustrophobic repetition of such lives. The first film is hardly light viewing
by any measure, but contains much camaraderie and joshing and flirting among
the workers, the constant preoccupation with hourly rates and productivity offset
with conspicuous consumption of the kind whereby one individual notes that
another is still using last year’s iPhone. Hard Times feels both
literally and figuratively darker, more deeply characterized by anxiety, by recurring
resentment that the rates are insufficient, that they’re lower than those paid last
year or in other shops; a greater number of its subjects are somewhat older,
with families, working to pay off debts. But despite their efforts to act
collectively, the workers have inherently little power, particularly embodied by
a group whose crooked boss takes off, his obligations unpaid, leaving them to scurry
around salvaging what they can. Like its predecessor, Hard Times ends by
showing some of its people back in their home villages, the explosion of light
and space almost dizzying in contrast to the compressed dinginess of what’s
gone before, partly celebratory but also underlining the strangeness of such far-flung
economic structures; the basic decency of the final note, one of respect for a
neighbor’s crops, underlines (if it were necessary) the scant evidence of
generosity in what precedes it.
