Make the Best of Us: Bing’s ‘Youth’ Cycle Expands Into the Gloom
The middle part of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy, Youth (Hard Times) perhaps more properly addresses the bleak realities of his observational endeavor, cobbled together into a cohesive structure from footage shot between 2014 and 2019. Following the Cannes premiered 2023 film Youth (Spring) (read review), which felt a rather cynical moniker for subjects tethered to Sisyphean work routines in their prime, his second installment, which appears to be more systematically edited into a time frame from 2015, suggests a more blatant, world weary scope. At a running time of nearly four hours, its immersive, repetitive structure, while inherently Bing’s signature, feels more punishing if only because there’s no real room for levity in its lengthy, often grueling discourse of late teens and twenty-somethings struggling to make ends meet in thankless textile shops.… Read the rest
