‘Youth (Hard Times)’: Locarno Review

Dir. Wang Bing. France/Luxembourg/Netherlands. 2024. 225mins 

Anyone complaining of a feeling of repetition while watching Wang Bing’s Youth (Hard Times) should count themselves lucky that they don’t have to work in one of the garment workshops of Xisheng Road in the Chinese city of Zhili. As with the previous episode in Wang’s documentary trilogy, 2023’s Youth (Spring), repetition – coupled with a feeling of claustrophobic enclosure – is very much of the essence in this evocation of the sheer grind of shopfloor life.

Not an easy film to watch, nor is it intended to be

With the trilogy’s closer, subtitled Homecoming, due to compete in Venice, second chapter Hard Times made a strong impression in Locarno, with a Special Mention, a FIPRESCI prize and the Young Jury award for the ‘Environment is Quality of Life’ prize – appropriately ironic, given the grim environment and wretched quality of life on display here.

Shot between 2014 and 2019 in Zhili, Zhejiang province, the trilogy depicts the lives of young migrant workers employed in some of the town’s 18,000-plus garment workshops – particularly concentrating on those located in the run-down concrete canyon of Xisheng Road. Once again, Hard Times immerses us in its subjects’ working and living conditions, and is very much a collective portrait, rather than putting the spotlight on specific individuals or spinning narratives. Indeed, the lack of precise narrative suggests a sort of endless circular process, in which the workers, mainly in their early 20s, continue to work gruellingly long hours, and must endlessly negotiate payment rates for piecework with recalcitrant bosses – rates which seem to get lower by the year.

The first hour feels very much like a reprise of Spring, showing cluttered and apparently ill-ventilated workshops, the men often working shirtless. Like Spring, the film ends on a note of merciful release as once again workers go home to their families, this time to celebrate New Year. 

In between, much of the film is concerned with the economics and tough labour realities of this sweatshop universe. Jobs involve anxiety and fatigue, a maximum of stress and little satisfaction, not to mention zero security. One workshop boss goes AWOL, leaving workers unpaid and defenceless – something that seemingly happens a lot here. Subsequently, a prospective buyer comes in to offer a low price for the business’s abandoned machines, the workforce’s only chance of getting paid – although they don’t expect to get much out of it.

A very telling interlude features a young man lying in bed in the dark, illuminated by the film on his laptop, and recalling events that happened in Zhili in 2011: unrest over taxes, leading to brutal police retaliation that left the storyteller traumatised and, he says, horribly enlightened about his nation. “That place,” he says of the police station where he was detained, “opened my eyes to the reality of this society. Something wrong, isn’t there?”

In a film that is largely about people powerlessly having to endure their discontent, this trenchantly direct statement provides a powerful moment of clarity and catharsis. Hard Times, as the name title suggests, is not an easy film to watch, nor is it intended to be. Whether Homecoming lives up to its title in offering some more gratifying release remains to be seen: just how it will wrap up this extensive, fearlessly in-depth project is something that serious documentary watchers will want to discover.