Return to Dust: human fortitude is the spectacle

Wandering through towering sand dunes and vast farmlands, Li Ruijun’s Return to Dust is ambitious, keenly observant cinema. The Chinese director’s sixth feature follows Cao Guiying (Hai Qing) and Ma Youtie (Wu Renlin), an unlikely couple brought together in a hastily arranged marriage, who slowly grow close as they weather the vicissitudes of rural life. Filmed in Li’s native Gaotai county in Gansu province, the film offers a glimpse of the merciless demolition of village communities and disappearing ways of life amid China’s rapid economic ascent.

There is little pretence or artifice in Return to Dust; for Li, human fortitude is the spectacle. Cao’s every minute is anxiously lived, her chronic incontinence a perpetual plague that determines the rhythms of her existence. Next to her, Ma is an ever-patient presence, accepting the cards that fate has dealt the couple.

Through numerous long takes, Wang Weihua’s camera beholds both the tenderness and the tribulations of the couple’s life. It lingers as we watch Cao and Ma prepare the soil and sow seeds together in the farmland; it gazes upon Cao as she holds out a jar of steaming hot water for her freezing husband; it observes the couple sharing a freshly caught fish with care and affection. Though those with the stamina for slow cinema will find abundant, delightful lyricism in this movie, Li runs the risk of stretching the maxim ‘show, don’t tell’ too far; of capturing too much and edifying too little. By the film’s end, we’re left with few penetrating insights into his protagonists.

But Li’s canvas is broader. Through Cao and Ma, issues such as the creeping urbanisation of village communities and exploitative labour practices are gradually fleshed out. At an emergency village meeting arranged to find a suitable blood donor to save local official Zhang Yongfu, one villager’s protests – that his fellow citizens are the ones who need saving, financially – fall on deaf ears. Ma turns out to be the only suitable donor; he attempts to use his blood donations to ask Zhang’s son to pay for the villagers’ missing land rent and wages, but his entreaties are met with indifference. Though Return to Dust is set entirely in China’s rural peripheries, the film provokes wider, familiar questions: what economic systems are at play when one’s blood is transacted for financial gain? Whose lives and wellbeing are assigned more value than others’? Perhaps it is Li’s raising of such questions that led to the film’s removal from Chinese streaming sites this September by state authorities.

Popular in its home country until the ban, Return to Dust brings to mind Li’s compatriot Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son (2019), also a Berlinale competitor, and one that has so far evaded domestic censorship. Wang’s film similarly deployed long, intimate takes and followed the lives of a married couple against the backdrop of China’s rapid urban development and socioeconomic upheavals. Wang belongs to the so-called ‘Sixth Generation’ of Chinese filmmakers (alongside Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye and Zhang Yuan, among others), some of whose artistic and intellectual leanings are shared by Li. Aspects in common include longing gazes upon disappearing hometowns as well as a reliance on realism to capture the physical and emotional displacement of small-town labourers. Wang’s film and Li’s have four-character Mandarin titles; several of these characters refer to natural elements (dust, smoke, ground, sky), underlining the importance of environment and landscape in the cinematic imagination of both directors.

But unlike So Long, My Son, which unravels in a series of flashbacks, Return to Dust’s progression is linear; there is no offer of cinematic relief or narrative escape for Cao and Ma from life’s day-to-day, minute-to-minute sufferings. Viewers must journey in tandem with the couple onscreen – an arduous task, yet one Li intends to carry the possibilities of greater compassion and empathy.

Ma is a man of few words, but it is clear that he is deeply pained by his own fate. Towards the end of the film, he shouts at his donkey: “You were used by others for most of your life, haven’t you had enough? Miserable beast.” Given the preceding events, it feels like a self-castigatory cry; suffused with agony and clarity, it is a powerful moment that sees the film transcend its quiet, somewhat static environment. Return to Dust presents the journey of the downtrodden, displaced man as an inescapable mix of fortunes: companionship tinged with loss, wretchedness tinged with hope – and the strength to press onwards despite the chaos all around.

► Return to Dust is in UK cinemas now.