![]() Like all of Wang's films, "Youth (Spring)" requires some patience, but during its longueurs, it is useful to reflect on the title. As the film progresses, the workers are shown making more assertive pushes for better wages, only to be rebuffed by high-handed managers. Right from the beginning, Wang emphasizes that even relationships have an economic dimension: The first two people we meet in the film are a couple, and a pregnancy forces them to make choices about whose family to live with, which in turn will have implications for their livelihood. People seek romantic partners within the workshops' walls. The workshops all have names, but they look much the same, and the conversations keep circling back to the same topics. By the time the three hours and 32 minutes of "Youth (Spring)"' have passed, viewers will probably be weary of the glow of tube lights and the jarring whir of sewing machines. The goal is to immerse viewers in a circumscribed environment, with only occasional breaks in the pattern. "Youth (Spring)" in some ways plays like a companion piece to Wang's film "'Til Madness Do Us Part" (2013), almost all of which was shot in a mental hospital. The textile workers, who have generally come from afar and tend to be in their late teenage years and 20s, live in unfinished-looking dorms. "Youth (Spring)" was shot between 20 in the city of Zhili, China, which, at least as it's presented in this film, consists of endless gray rows of textile workshops, many located on a street called Happiness Road. (And there is a funny moment here when two women ascending a staircase discuss the camera's semi-intrusive presence.) However, his focus, broadly speaking, is more on individuals than on institutions. To a degree, Wang is China's answer to Frederick Wiseman in that he gravitates toward nonintrusive documentaries with epic lengths. If you know the work of Wang Bing, you might have an idea of what to expect from "Youth (Spring)," a rare documentary to appear in the Cannes competition and an absolutely worthy one. ![]() But by Penn-Cannes standards, the movie is the right kind of overwrought. (Apparently, the reason is that Tyson spent part of his childhood in Brownsville, but he is a ridiculous distraction in the role all the same.) "Black Flies" deserves the flak it will take for its anguished machismo and for seriously belaboring its finale. It's not clear why he thought it would be a good idea to score chest compressions to Wagner's "Das Rheingold" or why he decided casting Mike Tyson as Ollie and Rut's chief made sense. If Sauvaire, born in France but living in Brooklyn, effectively uses real locations (snazzily shot at night by David Ungaro), his sense of atmosphere and proportion sometimes falters. This movie really needs more of its own material.) (Occasional bits of Christian iconography also seem taken, in this context, from Scorsese. Like "Bringing Out the Dead," it imagines its protagonist as being prone to hallucinations and seeing the whole city as if the red flash of siren lights was constantly strobing us. "Black Flies" is interested in the psychological impact that the parade of trauma has on Ollie. Penn, as usual, lays on the leatheriness a bit thick, but in Rut, he has a real part to apply it to for the first time in what seems like a while. The dialogue in these emergency scenes comes across as credible and well-researched. This is mainly an episodic film, as Ollie and Rut spend nights paying house calls to victims of gun violence, domestic abuse, drug addiction, and homelessness. But he is also more disillusioned and increasingly convinced that sometimes less care is more. Rut is more seasoned and less easily fazed at one point, he shares memories of being a 9/11 first responder. Tye Sheridan plays the Colorado-raised Ollie Cross, a rookie paramedic who, until he improves his MCAT score, is biding his time riding shotgun in an ambulance in the East New York and Brownsville areas of Brooklyn. His senior partner is Gene Rutkovsky (Penn), who has the apt nickname Rut. In this case, the "they" in "make-'em-like-they-used-to" is Martin Scorsese, and the "'em" is his 1999 film " Bringing Out the Dead," to which "Black Flies" bears many, many similarities, although it never has much hope of matching it. Fortunately, it's a much sturdier movie than any of those films, a make-'em-like-they-used-to gritty New York picture about the lives and minds of mean-streets paramedics.
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