Li Ruijun's tender, thought-provoking drama is a story about love expressed through action rather than reaction.
Draconian censorship laws in China mean that it’s rare to see films that criticise the pristine mother nation. Li Ruijun’s Return to Dust is an intriguing case, as it was initially deemed acceptable for cinemas, but was eventually pulled and banned for the crime of depicting rural life in China in a drastic and forbidding light. Acknowledging hardscrabble poverty, it seems, is a big no-no.
It’s a sad state of affairs to have government mechanisms in place to suppress any form of art and expression, but in this case it feels particularly egregious as writer/director Li Ruijun appears to have gone to great pains to play by the crooked rules. His intimate, slow-burn drama opens on a marriage of convenience, though it is not necessarily convenient for the two parties being bonded in matrimony, rather than it is for their families.
Guiying (Hai Qing) is a middle-aged woman deemed to be past her reproductive prime and who suffers from various chronic ailments including incontinence. Youtie (Wu Renlin) is a taciturn farm worker who just accepts his stale lot in life with unblinking neutrality. The pair, who are used to surviving on the most meagre of means, develop a partnership which evolves, very gradually, from passive business relationship to something like almost looks like love, though it is a love expressed through action rather than reaction.
The story takes place on the arid and unforgiving planes situated in the Gansu region of northwestern China – 2019 data suggests that it is officially the poorest region in the country. As a metaphor for this burgeoning, barely-visible romance, Youtie and Guiying pull their threadbare socks up and decide to create a little piece of paradise for themselves. We are then shown, in painstaking detail, the process of building a mud hut, including the creation of each red-brown “brick”
The backbreaking trails of life as depicted in this film clearly gave the censors the heebie-jeebies, and the pair’s epic exertions yield only meagre rewards. And if that wasn’t enough, Youtie is literally being bled dry by a local businessman who requires regular transfusions of his rare blood type, though our hero sternly rejects the gifts they attempt to force on him.
Though politics are never discussed directly, the film is implicitly critical of a system which has no idea of how its people actually live and what they need to survive. In one bitterly comic scene, the couple are relocated to a newbuild apartment block, and have trouble understanding how they’re able to cohabit with their essential livestock, including cinematic flavour of the month, a donkey.
Despite these subtle barbs, Return to Dust ends up as an elegiac love story as the unlikely couple form a bond built on a foundation of total understanding and empathy. The pacing of the drama can sometimes test the patience, yet its climactic chapter pays off on the laconic build-up.
Published 4 Nov 2022
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