Complete first draft for Slant Magazine.
The monumental trilogy that will likely serve as Wang Bing's final work filmed in his native China is named Youth, but it could have just as easily been named Three Colors. Like Krzysztof Kieślowski's summative triptych, Youth premiered in competition at three separate major European film festivals in the span of two years. Each installment bears a signature color, though it is primarily used to tint the title cards and chyrons that indicate a given sequence's setting and subjects. The first part, last year's Cannes installment Youth (Spring), appropriately uses a lush green; Youth (Hard Times), its successor at this year's Locarno, went with a punishing deep red. The concluding entry Youth (Homecoming), which premiered in Venice, opts for something that, like the film it characterizes, works in more ambiguous ways, using a light blue that, depending on a given viewer's viewpoint, could signal a calm, a harmony, or a sadness. In practice, Youth (Homecoming) operates as something of an expansion of the concluding sequences of both of its forebears. Both Spring and Hard Times—which both run a full hour longer than the fleet (by Wang's standards) 151-minute Homecoming—end with a few scenes showing some of the migrant garment factory workers returning to their home provinces from Zhili, the sole setting for almost the entirety of the first two parts. The effect was cathartic if not euphoric, a sudden expansion in visual scope—removed from the drone of the workshops—that often saw the sequences’ central figures in contemplation, at a slight remove from the places they nominally call home. Before Youth (Homecoming) spends its central hour immersed in these locations, it begins with a different vantage point on the operations in Zhili, initially highlighting Shi Wei, a fabric cutter working in a village outside the central hub of garment factories. As Wang slowly weaves together his central figures for the first two-thirds of the film, including Shi's friend's sister Dong Mingyan, he alights upon moments not typically found in the first two installments: wandering around the fields outside of town, cooking with proper ovens, playing cards; it isn't until a full thirty minutes in that the camera even ventures into the now-familiar roar of the workshops for the first time. After an arduous train-and-car journey to the snowy mountains of Ludian in the Yunnan Province, where Dong's husband Mu Fei hails from, Youth (Homecoming) observes work of a very different sort from the mind-numbing sewing and harsh negotiations: falling back into the family fold, with all the conflicted feelings and labors that a holiday break entails. Where Zhili's littered streets pointed in inexorable, seemingly never-ending straight lines, the mountains in Yunnan provide little guidance, an expanse that Dong and Mu trudge through, culminating in a rare (for this series) interview where Wang himself can be heard asking Dong about the state of her marriage. This sequence leads directly to the most forthrightly jubilant sequence in the entire trilogy: Shi Wei and his fellow worker Liang Xianglian's wedding, a procession in the same mountainous district as Mu Fei's residence. Full of bride-carrying ceremonies, silly string, and firecrackers, the sequence is transfixing on its own terms and as a crucial pivot point, offering a rosier view of matrimony and rural community that nevertheless contains a moment of disruption: Shi and Liang sitting on a bed, totally exhausted as they wait for the festivities continue. After winding its way through a few more segments of provincial life, including a 2016 Chinese New Year feast for the god of prosperity, Youth (Homecoming) eventually features Zhili in full force once more. This forty-minute segment is the collection of sequences that bears the most resemblance to its predecessors, evoking the feeling of the kaleidoscope of Youth (Spring), in a manner that only highlights the means by which this standalone yet summative work synthesizes the strengths of its predecessors: the enormous palette of Spring mixed with the focus of Hard Times. The Chinese title is "guī", which translates more accurately to return, a sentiment that, like "homecoming," is deliberately ambiguous. Through the course of Youth (Homecoming) and entire trilogy, the primary modus operandi has been expansion through repetition, a recursive exploration of similar spaces that nevertheless exhibits differing emotions, concerns, and personalities. In doing so, and in spending so much time with these remarkable, downtrodden people, Wang does a great deal to reconfigure what the concept of home means. As the combination of a conclusory final sequence in which another worker returns home in 2019 and the last shot of this nine-hour endeavor indicates, to return is a never-ending process, as fraught and isolating as the unknown.
