Berlin Dispatch – Return to Dust

Something that caught my eye when they announced the official selection of the 72^nd Berlinale was the inclusion of Chinese director Li Ruijun’s RETURN TO DUST. Not one Chinese film has made the competition lineups of Berlin, Cannes or Venice in the last two years (counting Cannes 2020 although technically there wasn’t a competition that year), a historically rare occurrence not even considering the fact that China has become the second largest film market in the world. The absence is partially attributable to the pandemic for sure, but the country’s ever-tightening censorship probably has more to do with it. At a time when other Asian countries like Japan and especially South Korea are amping up their cultural export, work by Chinese artists is getting less and less visibility outside of China, if at all.

For that reason alone, it’s a pleasant surprise to see Li’s film at an international festival like the Berlinale. And RETURN TO DUST delivers the goods too. It’s an intimate drama that, yes, very consciously skirts any taboos that might trigger the censors, but moves you with its warm humanist core anyway.

The story revolves around Youtie (Wu Renlin) and Guiying (Hai Qing), two middle-aged people from the most underdeveloped regions of the inland province of Gansu. The level of poverty they grow up knowing is quickly established in the opening scene where friends and family arrange their marriage. Youtie is a reticent farmer without a penny to his name, Guiying a recent widow who has a bad leg and cannot bear children. Whether out of necessity, pity or other considerations not related to love, the two strangers become man and wife. With nothing but one another, they slowly build a life for themselves from scratch. But just as they begin to learn about contentment and happiness, more challenges follow.

RETURN TO DUST tells a simple story about very uncomplicated people. Youtie and Guiying don’t have the luxury to consider their feelings or their relationship. It’s literally about sustenance, shelter, survival. In their unindustrialized part of the world, you earn what you can grow, you live within walls made from the soil under your feet. Everything they own comes from the ground. I find the depiction of this rustic, completely earth-bound lifestyle, communicated through scenes of tireless hard work, poetic and almost cathartically beautiful. The characters don’t have big words for the philosophy they live by, they simply sow, plow, weed, build, feed, harvest. Day in, day out. And little by little, the wheat and corn pop up, the chicks hatch and the pigs grow. Even though they still don’t have much, their labor is bearing fruit in the most immediate sense and seeing that fills my heart.

The production design and especially the cinematography by DP Wang Weihua bring these scenes to life. While the economic hardship faced by the couple is present, palpable in every frame, the visual teams turn the sights of the golden crops, the weatherworn house, even the dusty windowpanes into aesthetic wonders. When you see the couple huddle over a makeshift chicken pen where life is born, illuminated by the light spilling from the inside out, nothing looks remotely fancy and yet the splendor of hope is unmistakable.

Both leads are remarkable. I’m particularly taken with Wu Renlin’s portrayal of a traditional, unyieldingly decent, quietly loving man, someone who’d sooner die than complain. It’s a very physical performance and he got everything from the body language, the specific speech to the (distinct lack of) facial expressions down. Some of these details you may not even notice until he travels to the city in a few scenes and stands out so clearly as an alien presence. After watching the film one would find it hard to believe this coarse-skinned, verbally stunted man is in fact a professional actor.

What transpire at the end of RETURN TO DUST is quite vague, but I interpret it as an indictment of human greed which compels some of us to exploit others in ways not even animals are capable of. This is the closest the film gets to commenting on the world as we know it. Otherwise – as is admittedly appropriate for its setting – the film is asexual (and certainly not queer), politically uncritical, featuring morally upright characters and no violence or supernatural/fantastical elements, making it almost infuriatingly unproblematic. These decisions were probably all carefully considered in order to secure the official government approval and, in this case, they do not prevent the film from achieving what it sets out to do. But in general, creating art with pre-imposed restrictions in mind is still worrying. Artists cannot only work with a narrowed spectrum of the human experience or only tell stories set in extremely isolated places. In any case, here’s hoping we’ll be able to see more works from the Li Ruijun’s and the Wong Kar-Wai’s, Jia Zhangke’s, Lou Ye’s, Bi Gan’s… the way as they’re intended, sooner rather than later.