Shot over several years, “Youth (Homecoming)” rounds out Wang Bing‘s meticulous documentary trilogy about the shape of China’s youth. At two-and-a-half hours in length, it’s the project’s shortest and most focused entry, offering a look at what happens once the rattle of sewing machines finally ceases, followed by a stark and surprising look at what unfolds once they start back up again.
While it’s hard to call each subsequent entry a “sequel” in the traditional sense — its subjects have thus far changed not only from film to film, but from scene to scene — the trilogy’s progression has been distinctly sequential. “Youth (Spring)” captured the growing pains of young textile workers at the start of the season; “Youth (Hard Times),” meanwhile, followed their financial struggles in the summer, while the final entry captures the desertion of Zhili’s factories as the winter break approaches.
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Mechanical whirrs lure us into sweatshop spaces once more, only this time, they’re broken up by equally startling moments of silence. Logistically, this makes sense. The work has slowed down as the new year approaches, and many young laborers are trying to bargain for the compensation they’re owed so they can visit home. However, these alternating sounds and haunting echoes are disconcerting for another reason. They represent, in microcosm, the cyclical nature of this seasonal grind. Toil has so come to define these workers’ lives that it feels inescapable even in the interim. The silence is as deafening as the noise.
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Unlike the first two films, which introduce dozens of new workers at regular intervals — many of them interchangeable, which is the series’ mordant point — “Youth (Homecoming)” follows two people in particular: Shi Wei and Fang Lingping, both of whom are headed home to marry their respective partners during their time off. Furthermore, any secondary characters who are introduced are framed, via on-screen text, as extensions of the two of them: “Shi Wei’s mother,” “Fang Lingping’s brother,” and so on.
This packaging goes a long way towards flattening people’s individual lives and personalities. Wang’s roving camera takes on the role of the factories themselves, keeping an eye on the subjects in claustrophobic spaces even once they leave the production floor. Their long train rides home are uncomfortably crowded, and some of the walls and living spaces in their villages bear the same sterile glow of white fluorescents as their crumbling city bunks. When the workers finally return to Zhili — a transition presented so matter-of-factly that it’s hardly a transition at all — it feels as though they never left.
If the film’s secondary subjects are mere extensions of Wei and Lingping, both of whom are forever trapped by their roles as migrant laborers, then the oppressive web simply never ends. Lingping’s husband, for instance, has a background in I.T., but he’s forced to help her at the factory too, which strains their relationship in turn. Further interviews with family members back home, both old and young, flesh out the lives and struggles of China’s rural poor; while there’s plenty of joy and celebration to be found, the looming hand of enterprise is never far behind.
“Youth (Homecoming)” is, at times, an utterly depressing film about how those aforementioned rumbles and hums become omnipresent, a despondent status quo that Wei has come to accept as soon as the film begins. “While there’s work, there’s life!” he exclaims, between phone calls to his bosses as he tries to track down his missing paycheck.
“Youth (Homecoming)” stands on its own, as a genuinely sorrowful film about how deeply the churn of industry has worked its way into people’s bones, as though they’ve become one with the machines they operate. However, this also makes the movie a coda to the series as a whole. Not only are its bitter ironies built on the backs of the previous entries, but it perfectly follows their established trajectory. “Youth (Spring)” verged on defiant in its depiction of life and laughter. “Youth (Hard Times)” portrayed a struggle to maintain these tenets, in the face of workers being robbed of their humanity. And Wang’s final entry, for better or worse, captures workers as they attempt to escape the grasp of capitalist drudgery, which has so molded and contorted them, that it may as well be a part of their very beings. They have become the work — and returning to their cramped Zhili dormitories has become their homecoming.
