Observations in three sectors of China’s garment industry offers an open-ended musing on consumerism. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

CHINA’s industrialisation-on-steroids throws up such a rich and complex tangle of issues that it could fill an entire festival of documentaries and still not be done. At the New Zealand International Film Festivals alone, 2006’s China Blue left audiences despondent with its intimate portrait on life in a South Chinese jeans factory. In 2007, the epic and perversely beautiful Manufacturing Landscapes made art of China’s ecological disasters and put into striking relief the sheer scale of ‘progress’. This year’s Useless continues in that vein, with fly-on-the-wall observations of three varied corners of China’s garment industry: workers in a large-scale production line factory; a designer who rallies against the mass-machine-production of clothes and has created the eponymous hand-made collection called ‘Useless’ (Wuyong) for Paris Fashion Week; and finally the simple life of increasingly out-of-work tailors in small town Fengdang.

While Useless distinguishes itself as the perspective of a Chinese national (China Blue, Manufacturing Landscapes and this year’s Up the Yangtze are all American and Canadian productions), the one thing it seems to lack is a clear point of view. Ostensibly this was the filmmaker’s intention, to allow the audience to come to their own conclusions, but the overall effect instead seems to be one of confusion and/or apathy. This isn’t helped by the sneaking suspicion that little care has gone into the craft of the film – the camera technique appears to be ‘have dolly, will track very slowly, mostly from left to right’; the sound design is sparse and naturalistic, apart from sudden unmotivated level changes and awkward segues into cheesy-sounding Chinese ballads. Jia Zhang-ke focuses largely on objects and places – a ceiling fan in the grey concrete room where the factory workers have their meals; their lunchboxes all in a row – but ultimately fails to contextualise the inanimate with the people, whose lives are surely the main point of interest for the film. Strangely, their self-conscious stares at the camera objectify them rather than humanise, as if they were some kind of curious case-study and nothing more.

Useless does have its moments – for instance when a tailor insists on charging a meagre 2 yuan (40 cents) for mending trousers, even when offered more, even when – in the absence of any customers – she is left to deal with her drunken brother-in-law. The questions around consumerism and the value of human labour and life start to mean something when a tailor-turned-coalminer is asked if he likes the pink department-store satin suit he bought specially for his wife, and he answers simply “to be honest, she’s beautiful whatever she wears”. Their blushes speak volumes, and imbue what little is left of the film with a real poignancy. Earlier in the film, well-to-do designer Ma Ke insists that mass-produced clothes are disposable and devoid of history or story. That she imbues her garments with meaning by burying them in the ground or employing other workers to do the painstaking hand-weaving for her seems to be a metaphor for the film itself – without care, craft and true emotional investment in the creation of something, it is otherwise empty.