Locarno Film Festival 2024: Youth (Hard Times), Transamazonia, Moon

It’s been hot in Locarno, Switzerland. So much so that every person introducing a film has joked about the respective theater’s air conditioning being a welcomed respite to accompany the movies. This being my first time covering Locarno Film Festival, where a leopard’s roar accompanies every screening — I can only concur that this 77th edition has reduced me to a puddle of sweat looking for the nearest gelato stand to provide the kind of cold goodness that’ll reanimate me. Thankfully, the air conditioning has been the perfect aperitif to movies offering a slower, more glacial pace.    

Wang Bing, the king of long cinema, has returned with the second installment in his observational “Youth” trilogy. “Youth (Hard Times)” is a notable improvement over “Youth (Spring),” which premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival — the third part, “Youth (Homecoming),” will premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Running 227 minutes, “Hard Times” feels tighter, better conceived, with clearer ties and arcs that paint a better picture of a youthful generation trapped on the margins. 

Shot between 2015 and 2019, Bing, along with several other camera operators, immersed himself in the textile workshops lining the town of Zhili in the Wuxing District of Huzhou. These privately owned shops are combined spaces, housing the workers in dormitories after they’ve worked from dawn to midnight. These can be called businesses only in the sense that they produce a product. But they don’t follow any guidelines, codes or laws. Lately, there’s been a rash of owners suddenly picking up sticks and leaving their workers high and dry. All the workers can do is find another shop, somewhere else in Zhili that maybe pays close to what they were earning. But as we see throughout Bing’s epic-length vérité documentary, even the rates that are promised by sweatshop owners are dangerously flexible. 

Most of the workers we see on screen hail from Anhui province, a mostly rural area that contrasts greatly from the grimy concrete edifices that populate the blocks often doubling as landfills. Surrounded by garbage and humming machines, the subjects build out a life: joking, dating, debating, and fighting for extra wages from their penny-pinching shop owners. In makeshift unions they negotiate at what rate they’ll make the next fast fashion, and they struggle to recoup their wages when they lose their paybook. Each instance of exploitation builds on the other, creating a single unit with a shared story of survival until the new year when they can return home before the next season. With a promise of a new setting — these workers’ hometowns — on top of this beautifully captured slice of humanity, Bing makes it attractive for one to finish the journey he started.   

This is admittedly a broad comparison, but if you can imagine “The Mosquito Coast” told from Reverend Spellgood’s perspective, you’d probably come somewhat close to “Transamazonia,” South African director Pia Marais’ quiet Amazon-set mood piece. Marais’ film similarly deconstructs godlike figures, questions the reality of miracles, and sees the wiser child learn that their father is all bunk. 

It begins and thrives through ambiguity. The opening shot pushes in on two upturned seats in the middle of a humid, foggy jungle. An unconscious girl, the lone survivor of a plane crash, is covered in mud and blood. She is carried to safety by an Indigenous man of the Iruaté tribe, where she is claimed by her father: Lawrence Byrne (Jeremy Xido). Flash forward nine years, and Lawrence and his daughter Rebecca (a deceptively brilliant Helena Zengel) are operating a church for the locals under the promise that Rebecca, a literal miracle child, can heal the sick, wounded, and dispirited. They’ve got a profitable gig going until sawmill owner Artur Alves (Rômulo Braga) appears begging for help for his wife, who's been in a coma for ages. If Rebecca can awaken his wife, he promises to depart the jungle, where his company is in a violent dispute with the displaced Iruaté people. 

Lit in cool tones by D.P. Mathieu De Montgrand, this gorgeously mounted film prides itself on its sense of mystery: We never learn how Rebecca survived that plane crash or whether she performs miracles or is just the recipient of dumb luck. For a time, we don’t even know why Lawrence is so hellbent on pushing Rebecca to save Artur’s wife. Because of those fissures, Marais keeps one from simply labeling Rebecca a white savior. How can she fit the stereotype if we’re not actually sure she has saved anyone? When a nurse named Denise (Sabine Timoteo) arrives, the previously tranquil relationship between father and daughter is further imbalanced, causing the daughter, probably for the first time in her life, to question her faith in the godlike figure that is her father. 

These wonderful components are sometimes undone by the outside gaze on the indigenous tribe and by the unconscionable decision by the Marais and her screenwriters to tie together every loose thread in the final ten minutes in a film that works because of its open-endedness. Despite those missteps, there’s enough mystique in “Transamazonia” to make it spellbinding and haunting.   

There’s nothing worse than seeing a great film lurking underneath the tragically flawed result. Such is the case with “Moon,” the Austrian-Kurdish writer/director Kurdwin Ayub’s slow-burn Jordan-set thriller. While many films, particularly the low-budget action kind, have rendered the washed-up MMA fighter into a cliche — Ayub takes a different route. Having seemingly lost the will to fight, Sarah (Florentina Holzinger), is now training others. Most of her clients aren’t serious. They’re taking classes because MMA is trendy. The terse, monotone Sarah is also unwilling to play along. Very nearly broke, Sarah takes an odd offer: The son of a wealthy Jordanian family wants to hire Sarah to train his three younger sisters. In return, not only will she be handsomely compensated. She’ll also stay in a luxe fully paid hotel room complete with a personal driver, who will take her to the family’s far-flung compound. 

When Sarah arrives, however, it’s not altogether clear that these three young women — Fatima (Celina Sarhan), Nour (Andria Tayeh), and Schaima (Nagham Abu Baker) — are actually interested in MMA. There are several other red flags: Sarah is required to sign an NDA, forbidden from venturing to the home’s second floor or going into the girls’ rooms, also cell phone use isn’t permitted for the girls, and the house lacks WiFi. Soon, Sarah begins to investigate and finds a woman yelling for help behind a locked door, the girls ask to use her phone for IG, disturbing videos arise and rumors about the family from the locals swirl. The appearance of violence creates a telling tension: Sarah is here to teach self-defense and empowerment but hesitates to defend or empower her pupils. 

Ayub pulls those feelings of hopelessness, malaise, and regret tight, making them so taut she upends our expectations until she doesn’t. The Arab world here is projected as purely oppressive and by the final frame Sarah, the white outsider, is ultimately reimagined as a savior speeding to the rescue. It's an unfortunate slip up by Ayub. In trying to land a sharp emotional gut punch on the audience, she squanders the provocative body blows that got us to this point.