What happens when young people with jobs in the big city return to the homes they left behind? It’s a question that powers a whole bevy of films, including Hallmark’s holiday offerings. But it’s perhaps less expected in a 152-minute Chinese documentary, the final installment in a trilogy stretching nearly 10 hours.
“Youth (Homecoming)” (in theaters), directed by the eminent filmmaker Wang Bing, is shorter by at least an hour than its predecessors, “Youth (Spring)” and “Youth (Hard Times).” Wang shot the films over about five years, spending time with the myriad young people, mostly in their late teens and 20s, who travel to the city of Zhili to work in garment factories. No one subject is the main protagonist in the “Youth” trilogy; instead, we see a collage of faces and personalities, all of whom toil very long hours for very little pay.
“Spring” is the most cheerful of the films, showing the laborers as they arrive and get busy at their machines, often singing to pop music and talking about love. “Hard Times,” which covers the winter months, shows them struggling to get paid by bosses who skip town or try to drive down wages. The workers begin to organize, but it’s a battle with little chance of victory.
In “Homecoming,” as the title suggests, many young people return to their remote villages for the New Year’s break when the factories slow down. We travel with them on packed, long-haul trains and traverse muddy mountain paths. Now families enter the picture, identified in the film only by their relationships to the laborers. Two of the subjects, Shi Wei and Fang Lingping, marry their romantic partners during this downtime. Others converse with loved ones about their plans or other subjects. Eventually the young people go back to Zhili, only to discover that employment is not always easy to come by.
Wang’s films tend to drop us into the room, letting us observe as if invisible while the subjects carry on. That basic style carries over here, even though there are some interviews with relatives and fewer laborers appear, since going home means spreading out across the country. We sit with families at dinner, listen to their conversations, observe the Mao Zedong posters on the walls, watch young children toddle around. We’re drawn into their world, and that’s what makes the “Youth” movies so appealing: the takes are very long, and we get to dwell inside the frame.
There’s little that visually or tonally matches the Hollywood version of the going-home story, for obvious reasons. These workers mostly come from poor backgrounds and remote regions. Their families are intergenerational, living close together or in the same house. Their future responsibilities for their loved ones are the product of this structure.
But if you look closely, you might catch some unexpected harmonies. Most of these young people are wrestling with the same questions that young people everywhere ask. Who will I marry? Do I wish to marry at all? Will I have children? What will my future look like? And how do the constraints of my family background — our money, our problems, our illnesses, our bickering and our love — shape my future? They’re the questions we can sometimes ignore away from home, but arriving back where we started brings them up again. A homecoming is never simple, no matter where in the world you are.
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