RETURN TO DUST - Mark Reviews Movies

Return to Dust, Film Movement

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 20, 2023

It's inherently difficult, if not nearly impossible, to make critical art under an authoritarian regime, and writer/director Li Ruijun must clearly balance a fine line with Return to Dust, a slice-of-life portrait of two peasant farmers in modern-day rural China. On the surface, the filmmaker tells the story of finding nobility and meaning in both poverty and work. Since its local release, though, the film quietly has been banned in its native country, so Li certainly has done something right.

The story here revolves around Ma (Wu Renlin), a quiet and lonely farmer who's looked down on by his family and basically an outcast within his village, and Cao (Hai Qing), a woman who has had her spirit beaten out of her after a life of abuse and neglect. Their families arrange for the two, both of middle age, to be married, if only because Ma could use help on the farm to meet demand and Cao is still considered to be a burden to her family.

It's a forced union that neither particularly wants or necessarily needs, and their misery while taking a photo for their marriage certificate is undeniably visible. Even so, Ma doesn't expect anything of his new wife, who tries not to sleep at night in a shared bed and leaves behind puddles of her own urine under the constant anxiety.

He barely speaks to Cao, let alone scold or yell at or criticize her in any way, but there's a gentleness to the way he silently covers the wet spot on the mattress, as if to simultaneously communicate acknowledgment and understanding of what she's going through under these unanticipated conditions. The whole film comes to be filled with such little gestures on the part of both of these characters.

To call the film a love story is both accurate, in that these two characters do form a close and deep bond that comes to transcend how they were married and their circumstances, and not quite right, in that it would be a stretch to see this relationship as romantic in any way. They might not want or need each other at any point in the ensuing tale, but each one's life becomes more fulfilling together than it might have been apart. What else, really, could one want or need from any relationship?

That's the film's surface, which almost certainly could be interpreted as a dishonest or misguided view of arranged marriages, the intended purpose of life as a peasant in China, and some natural order to society. One could look at that exclusively, but it's not the full extent of Li's story, which sets this idealistic union against the forces of manipulative family members, vampiric business interests enabled by the government, and the destructive policies of the government itself.

Those last two, by the way, are literal descriptions. That thread comes to define the aims and tragedy of Return to Dust more than anything else.

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