One of China’s indie filmmakers best known to festival audiences, Li Ruijun has often trained his camera on life in rural China and the Gansu province where he grew up. His urban working-class drama Walking Past the Future (Un Certain Regard 2017) was something of an exception, and its failure to break into the mainstream, despite its stars, is perhaps behind the change of pace to the lyrical, slow-moving Return to Dust (Yin Ru Chen Yan.)
It does, indeed, mark the writer-director’s return to evocative landscapes and endless farmlands stretching out under a wide blue sky in northwest China. In this classical, timeless setting, a quiet love takes root, sprouts and grows between two unwanted people, while in the distance the threatening wheels of greed and modernity are set in motion. It’s a lovely story and Li Ruijun tells it with humble simplicity and directness. But as much as one admires the film’s lack of sentimentality or grand-standing dramatics, it is stamped for-festival-use-only by its dragging pace and lack of narrative rhythm. As the protags labor over grueling chores around the farm, time does not exactly fly by in a story that clocks in at over two hours. It would be interesting to see what this talented director could come up with if he stopped being his own editor and passed that responsibility on to fresh eyes.
In a smartly directed opening scene, the leather-faced farmer Ma Youtie (Wu Renlin), better known by the anonymous moniker Fourth Brother, or sometimes as Iron, meets for the first time the woman his family has arranged for him to marry. Like Ma Youtie, Cao Guiying (Hai Qing) is pushing middle age. Not only can she not have children, but childhood beatings and abuse have left her psychologically traumatized and physically incontinent. Her lack of bladder control is an embarrassment that follows her wherever she goes, along with cruel comments. In this arranged marriage, both families are getting rid of an unwanted outcast. The two remain silent, keeping their eyes downcast, but much later Guiying remarks that she noticed something about her future husband that day: it was the way he comforted his donkey, after his brother beat it. Guiying will one day tell him that she has been treated worse than a donkey.
The couple goes to live in one of the many primitive abandoned farmhouses in the area, a hovel made of mud bricks with no electricity or amenities. Soon they are told they will have to move, and move again, as rich villagers scheme to demolish outlying buildings and develop the land. Singlehandedly, with only the aid of his not very strong wife, Ma Youtie sets about building a house for them from the ground up, beginning with making the mud bricks. Hundreds of them – and Li Ruijun spares us not a step, drawing the process out rather than summarizing it. This happens concurrently with their farm work: plowing the earth with their donkey, planting seeds, nursing seedlings, growing wheat, harvesting it and so on and on. But we follow along, often unwilling and not for the story, certainly, but for the moving account of the farmers’ peasant wisdom and their elemental relationship to the earth, which is life itself, conveyed in DP Wang Weihua magnificent landscapes and warm candlelit night scenes.
Though the film steers clear of politics as far as it can, a silent criticism is present in the eyes of the poor farmer and his wife; for the first time in her life, she feels well-treated and protected. But from the greed of their relatives and neighbors and the dictates of the Village Committee there is no protection. And to top it off, Ma Youtie, who has a rare blood type, is forced to donate large quantities of blood to the landowner who keeps the farming community afloat with his capital. The landowner literally squeezes the blood out of him — and Guiying can do nothing to stop it.
The story is impressively acted by Wu Renlin, who appeared in the director’s Fly with the Crane, and actress Hai Qing, who has worked in more mainstream titles; here their odd, slow motion chemistry is compelling and always believable. Complementing the exceptional visuals is the very delicate and subtle music by top Iranian composer Peyman Yazdanian (Hit the Road, Radiograph of a Family), who knows just how to blend into and heighten this rural love story.
Director, screenplay, editing: Li Ruijun
Cast: Wu Renlin, Hai Qing, Yang Guangrui, Zhao Dengping, Wang Cailan
Producers: Qin Hong, Zhang Min, Li Yan
Executive producer: Xiang He
Cinematography: Wang Weihua
Production design: Li Ruijun, Han Dahai
Music: Peyman Yazdanian
Sound: Wang Changrui
Production companies: Qizi Films, J.Q. Spring Pictures, Such a Good Film, Alibaba Pictures, Dream Media, Hucheng No. 7 Films, Aranya Pictures, Qin Zi Zai (China)
World sales: M-Appeal
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Competition)
In Mandarin (Gansu dialect)
131 minutes
