Return to Dust
隐入尘烟
China, 2022, colour, 1.55:1, 132 mins.
Director: Li Ruijun 李睿珺.
Rating: 6/10.
Indie Mainland film-maker Li Ruijun’s warmest film since Fly with the Crane, despite being unnecessarily long.
STORY
A village in Gansu province, northwest China, Feb 2011. In an arranged marriage via a matchmaker (Xu Caixia), farmer Ma Youtie (Wang Renlin) is married to Cao Guiying (Hai Qing). The latter was bullied and beaten as a child, is lame, cannot have children, and suffers from a chronic weak bladder; her elder brother (Ma Zhanhong) and his wife (Wang Cuilan) cannot wait to get rid of her. Both Ma Youtie and Cao Guiying rarely talk. On the edge of the desert, Ma Youtie takes along his new wife as he pays respects to his late parents and eldest two brothers. Local landowner Zhang Yongfu, who owes money to his tenant farmers, is ill in hospital and his son (Yang Guangrui) announces that he urgently needs blood. The other farmers urge Ma Youtie to donate his blood, as he is the only person with the same rare group (known as “panda blood” – RH negative). After Ma Youtie delivers some furniture to a relative in the city, he finds Cao Guiying waiting for him by the roadside at night in the freezing cold as he returns with his cart and beloved donkey. They experience their first moment of mutual tenderness. He teaches her how to sow seed in the fields. They work for his third brother, Ma Youtong (Zhao Dengping), in whose house they live while he’s away in Dongguan, Guangdong province, in the south. They don’t have a TV of their own, so they watch a neighbour’s. After hearing the government is giving RMB15,000 for every demolished vacant house – as part of a clean-up of villages – Ma Youtong briefly comes back from Dongguan to tell his younger brother to move to another empty house in the village so he can claim the money. Ma Youtie and Cao Guiying start to build their own house by baking clay bricks in the sun. Work is interrupted when Ma Youtie is again asked by Zhang Yongfu’s son to donate blood. During the summer, the house slowly grows, and the couple’s crops ripen. Ma Youtie continues to give more blood and tries to persuade Zhang Yongfu’s hard-headed son to pay the farmers what they’re owed. After a good harvest, Ma Youtie and Cao Guiying move into their own house, so the one they’re living in – owned by Ma Chengwan (Zhang Jinhai) who lives in Shenzhen – can be demolished. Cao Guiying says she never dreamed she would live in her own house; Ma Youtie promises to buy her a tv and take her to the city for the first time. He then hears that, under the National Poverty Alleviation Policy, he’s eligible for an 80 square metre council apartment in the city for only RMB10,000 – a 20th of the market price. But Ma Youtie is reluctant to leave behind his farm, donkey and chickens. And then tragedy strikes.
REVIEW
After his fractionally more mainstream diversion, Walking Past the Future 路过未来 (2017), which was largely set in Shenzhen, indie Mainland film-maker Li Ruijun 李睿珺 returns to his usual setting of Gansu province, northwest China, for his sixth feature Return to Dust 隐入尘烟, his most emotionally engaging feature since Fly with the Crane 告诉他们，我乘白鹤去了 (2012), his third feature made a decade ago. Powered by two utterly convincing performances by Wu Renlin 武仁林 and Hai Qing 海清, as two peasants in an arranged marriage who gradually discover a true mutual love, the film actually benefits from Li’s spare, unvarnished direction as its emotional palette grows by small degrees against a realistically drawn village background. With local box office of RMB114 million – a modest figure in the great scheme of things but one that most other arty independents (and many mainstream, too) can only dream of – it’s easily been Li’s biggest commercial success so far, almost five times the take of Walking. However, despite all that, it would still be just as effective with half an hour shorn off its running time.
Back in his home province after Walking, Li, 39, immediately gives the impression of being far more comfortable with his subject matter. For the viewer, there are the usual difficulties of adjusting to the director’s slow, arty pace, the thick local dialect, and working out who exactly is who (a problem the gruff rural dialogue is not much help with). But as these mists clear, the film settles down into what is basically an odd-couple story – the unambitious fourth brother of the Ma family, who doggedly farms a patch for his third brother (who’s down south in Dongguan, Guangdong province, making money) and whose closest friend is his loyal donkey, and the lame, sterile, slightly hunchbacked Cao Guiying, who’s been bullied all her life and whom her elder brother and sister-in-law can’t wait to offload via a matchmaker. The two social outsiders are both as taciturn as each other but, as they go about their daily work with a peasant doggedness, they gradually discover a shared future, and their own kind of deep, mutual love.
Despite some obviously filmy touches – Ma Youtie creating a chicken hatchery out of a lightbulb and a box with holes, or Cao Guiying’s wonder at nature and the natural world – the film sketches the incremental growth of the couple’s relationship (from zero to 100) with a beguiling naturalness, making this Li’s warmest undertaking since Crane. Chemistry between the two leads is very natural, despite Wu (who’s had supporting roles in Li’s The Old Donkey 老驴头, 2010, and Crane) being a non-professional and 45-year-old Hai Qing (real name: Huang Yi 黄怡) being a professional actress with a string of roles during the past two decades (including the physician’s wife in Sacrifice 赵氏孤儿, 2010, the ballsy daughter in What a Wonderful Family, 2017, and the bolshie reporter in Operation Red Sea 红海行动, 2018). Without diminishing Wu’s contribution, it’s largely the subtle, chameleon performance by Hai Qing that makes the pairing such a success. Villagers and locals – as usual in Li’s films, cast from non-pros – are used almost like a Greek chorus, mumbling in the background about the couple and their evolving relationship with a rural bluntness.
Plotting is simple, with the passage of the year marked by changes in nature, crops and weather, and for stretches the film is almost a farming manual as Ma Youtie teaches Cao Guiying how to sow seeds, bring in the harvest and so on. A slim underlying plot is the way in which a landowner’s son is always trying to bamboozle the local tenant farmers out of what he owes them; but the main plot driver is the fact that Ma Youtie is the only one in the village with the same rare blood type (RH negative) as the landowner himself, who’s in hospital and desperately needs transfusions. By volunteering his blood (known as “panda blood” for its rareness), Ma Youtie becomes a hero to his fellow peasants and a necessity to the landowner’s son, who keeps plying him with gifts. But even when he becomes eligible for a new flat in town, Ma Youtie would rather stay with his donkey and chickens – and in the simple house that he and Cao Guiying made themselves from mud bricks.
The clean, unfussy photography (almost in academy ratio) by Wang Weihua 王维华 (Walking) supports Li’s simple approach to the material, and music by regular composer Peyman Yazdanian is very sparingly used, largely during the final 50 minutes. Together they create a feeling of the couple inhabiting a separate world of their own, even within the village, let alone the town to which Cao Guiying has never been in her life. As usual serving as his own editor, Li cuts in an unfussy way, apart from sometimes switching to a wider shot to show the couple aren’t actually alone.
CREDITS
Presented by Qizi Films (CN), Beijing JQ Spring Pictures (CN), Shanghai Such A Good Film (CN), Beijing Alibaba Pictures Culture (CN), Anhui Dream Media (CN), Hucheng No. 7 (Beijing) Films (CN), Aranya Pictures (CN), Hangzhou Qin Zi Zai (CN), Beijing Showcase Culture Media (CN). Produced by Hucheng No. 7 (Beijing) Films (CN).
Script: Li Ruijun. Photography: Wang Weihua. Editing: Li Ruijun. Music: Peyman Yazdanian. Art direction: Li Ruijun, Han Dahai. Styling: Wu Jinying. Sound: Wang Yu, Wang Changrui.
Cast: Wu Renlin (Ma Youtie/Iron, fourth brother), Hai Qing (Cao Guiying), Yang Guangrui (Zhang Yongfu’s son), Zhao Dengping (Ma Youtong, third brother), Wang Cailan (Ma Youtong’s wife), Zeng Jiangui (Ma Youtong’s elder son), Wu Yongzhi (Ma Youtong’s younger son), Ma Zhanhong (Cao Guiying’s elder brother), Wang Cuilan (wife of Cao Guiying’s elder brother), Xu Caixia (Ma Hongmei, matchmaker), Li Shengfen (village head), Li Shenghong (village secretary), Li Shengjun (team leader), Wang Xiaolan (Zhang Yongfu’ wife), Zhang Min (clothes-shop owner in town), Liu Yihu (Ma Youwen), Zhang Jinhai (Ma Chengwan).
Premiere: Berlin Film Festival (Competition), 13 Feb 2022.
Release: China, 8 Jul 2022.