19/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: The latest epic documentary from Wang Bing is a raw look at Chinese capitalism, seen through the eyes of a resilient group of young sweatshop workers

A unique and not always commented-upon feature of Wang Bing’s films is their variation of the “bystander effect”, something that Cannes competition jury president Ruben Östlund, who’s set to judge the film this fortnight, is also deeply conversant with. In this time of great and necessary scrutiny of the working conditions of film productions, Wang’s work reckons complexly with notions of ethical documentary making: a number of his films show their protagonists in startling physical danger, and he or his operator are clearly instructed to just keep rolling, with the camera subject potentially in pain and the audience in near-equal shock. But the opposite side of the equation, if documentary is truly the “cinema of the real”, is to ask what is lost by excising or censoring imagery like this, especially if it is merely danger, and not death, that is endured.

There’s what could grimly be called a trademark sequence of this in Wang’s new opus Youth (Spring) [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which premiered in Cannes’ competition yesterday and marks the first instalment in a trilogy on the same subject matter. But to be blunt on it, blunter than this often remarkably nuanced film is, Wang is principally a bystander and observer here to the illest effects and detritus of unregulated free-market capitalism, which China, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, began to integrate into its own economic planning, resulting in a vertiginous turbo-boost in GDP.

From macro to the absolute micro, we alight, for a deceptively well-structured three-and-a-half hour running time, on several sweatshops (or, as the on-screen titles call them, workshops) in Zhili City, a “company town” studded with different outposts in the supply chain for mass-produced clothing. In a film of chilling historical ironies, the youth in the film’s mid-2010s shooting period have been “sent down” to this new industrial town one province away from Shanghai, whereas in the Cultural Revolution, it was in the inverse direction, for rural work and “rustication”.

Wang’s editing skips around vignettes in no particular order, giving a telling hint of life in around ten of these workshops (they’re identified in captions with a number tag amounting to triple figures – how many are there, we wonder?). The youngsters, ranging in age from their late teens to their early twenties, are identified in name as well, but their screen time is so brief that one can barely retain that information. Their behaviour – working their fingers off on those sawing sewing machines, immaturely discovering love and sex, bravely bartering with their employers for fairer pay – sticks instead, and is echoed from person to person, environment to environment, giving the impression of one collective mass of need and energy, like in Eisenstein’s famous (and far more stylised) propaganda films.

Like Jia Zhangke, arguably the other most important mainland filmmaker of the 21st century, Wang has been dedicated to chronicling the surge of contemporary Chinese history, and the human misfortune left in its wake, as the nation has undergone feverishly accelerated development. But as this film’s thesis becomes clearer, and we acclimatise to his rigorous handheld cinematography, and the subjects’ ramblingly energetic vérité interactions, its universal qualities glow ever more brightly. Youth (Spring) is a work about retaining one’s dignity in labour; just observe how often the characters smile.

Youth (Spring) is a co-production between France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and China, produced by House on Fire, Gladys Glover and CS Production, and co-produced by Les Films Fauves, Volya Films, ARTE France Cinéma, Le Fresnoy, and Eastern-Lion Pictures and Culture Media Co. Its world sales are handled by Pyramide International.