‘Youth Review: Look Inside Chinese Sweatshops Is Long, Sobering And Occasionally Fun
This year's Cannes Film Festival offered a wide selection of documentaries, two of which were only entered for the main competition, where documentaries are almost never shown. And if those who come for the first three days of the festival have one thing in common, it's the scale. These documents are large, long and deep.
Two of these, showing Wednesday, are Steve McQueen's "City Taken," a four-hour tour of 130 different locations in the city, about what happened there during World War II and what's happening now; and Wim Wenders' Anselm, which uses Wenders' favorite 3D to create the grand space in which German maximalist artist Anselm Kiefer creates his monumental masterpieces.
Another entry was made in the massive Cannes Documentary Lottery on Thursday. Chinese director Wang Bing, who has two films at this year's festival, competes with Youth, three and a half hours not seeing the carefree youth of his country, but a clothing store where many of them are tried on. The film is both grueling and disturbing, and its persistence is in many ways its essence as audiences spend 212 minutes each day watching the state in which these young people, most of them in their late teens and twenties, live. day.
Youth was filmed over five years in Zhili, China, where there are more than 18,000 children's clothing workshops. You'll get this information with a single card in the beginning of the film's end credits, but otherwise there's no background, no explanation, no context in this cinéma vérité documentary, which only shows us a few of these shops. people who work and live there.
And the world of "Youth" is one with little separation between weekdays and other days. In inconspicuous-looking and generally dilapidated and large buildings, the bosses occupied, as it were, the first floors, where workers sewed clothes all day long, and a floor or two above they sat on wooden benches at sewing machines. Above is the dormitory where the workers live, who share a bathroom and receive water for showers downstairs.
Many of these buildings, judging by the names that sometimes tell us about their location, are located on the street. Gluck, a street whose name sounds sarcastic and mockery at its worst. But "Youth" is not a chronicle of suffering, although something perishes; rather, it is a chronicle of a life lived under these circumstances, and that life can be exciting, different, and sometimes just as enjoyable as life elsewhere.
Wang's cells seem to have unlimited access. At one point, the boss enters the room and appears to be moving towards the target, but instead of blocking or blocking it, it drives away. What goes on in front of these cameras is just her late teens and young adults, which means a lot of banter, a lot of teasing, and a lot of teasing.
In fact, over long periods of time, sustainable relationships may or may not develop between young men and women who work side by side all day and live apart at night. But there's something funny about this conversation, because men are usually sexier, chasing after women who may be their friends but define romance. "You are so stupid," the woman explained patiently. "I was a fool to come here," said his future girlfriend.
In the workshop, the focus is on speed, as workers are paid by product, not by the hour. A model might charge 18 yuan for a coat, or about $2.50; others can buy 5.5 yuan, less than 80 cents, and everything has to be produced under difficult conditions.
"There's no way I can do this," one young man complained about the workload.
"So what are you doing here?" asked the woman.
"Executive Movement"
But workers want to be paid for responding to these demands, and wage disputes are another common topic among young people. Sometimes the people who make the clothes are trying to figure out how much they can ask from a manager they know is underpaid, and sometimes management will turn down their request or outright ridicule them for asking.
For a three-and-a-half hour documentary, Youth doesn't cover a wide range of topics or subjects; place it in a dark and gloomy environment and cover some objects repeatedly. Wang takes you into the neighborhood and holds you there, which of course is perfect for a movie about people who don't really have the option to leave without risking their lives.
This film shows that people can still be entertained in an environment defined by a kind of claustrophobic boredom, while also making audiences feel that boredom until there were small but constant leaks at the film's Cannes premiere. audience exits approached the two-hour mark. (Some of these people take a short break and then return to the theater, many don't.)
Toward the end, the film moves past the sweatshops as the worker returns to his home state, where the details—walking on the grass in the rain, having windows in bedrooms—seem monumental. "Youth" does not expect us to have a happy ending, but at least let the audience rest a little after a long and instructive, but calm.
By the way, another of Wang's documentaries at Cannes is The Man in Black, about the dissident Chinese composer Wang Xiling. It runs just 60 minutes, a touch of minimalism that surprised at the Cannes Film Festival, which until recently had specialized in maximalist documentaries.
