CIFF 2022 | ‘Return to Dust’ review: Enough with the “poor Chinese peasant” stories, please
Li Ruijun’s arthouse crowd-pleaser is a middling underdog romance at best, and gratuitous poverty porn at its worst.
Wu Renlin and Hai Qing in “Return to Dust.” Photo courtesy of Hucheng No. 7 Films.
It’s become clearer and clearer to me, an ethnically Chinese film writer, that most of the Western film scene’s impressions of China have been shaped almost entirely by popular media. Even in an age of growing diversity in film and TV, we are still used to the stereotypical narrative of the long-suffering Chinaman, whether he’s struggling to make it as a penniless immigrant in America, or struggling to keep up his agricultural mode of life back home.
“Return to Dust” is one of the latter films — namely, a film that doesn’t really expand past the countless narratives of pain and marginalisation that plenty of other films have tackled time and time again. What it does try to do is put a novel spin on that narrative, by focusing on how an arranged marriage between two disabled social outcasts in the impoverished rural province of Gansu unexpectedly grows into true love and respect. These two outcasts, Iron Ma (Wu Renlin) and Guiying (an unrecognisable Hai Qing) come together to create a fairly heartwarming underdog love story, but the film nonetheless fails to escape the trappings of cliché.
One might think I’m being a little unfair here. After all, director Li Ruijun is from Gansu himself, and wanted to depict rural Chinese life in as much detail as possible. Some of his choices do indeed smack of authenticity, such as the decision to write the dialogue in Zhongyuan Mandarin, a northwestern dialect that fluent speakers of Standard Mandarin might sometimes find hard to parse. Cinematographer Wang Weihua’s sweeping shots of the stark, barren, snow-blanketed landscapes in the Chinese countryside certainly help, too — it’s not often that we get to see so many different views of the country, from sand dunes to ice fields and clay flats. Even then, authenticity aside, one must question the necessity of bringing such a narrative into a canon of film already oversaturated with similar stories.
As some arthouse crowd-pleasers in the festival circuit do, “Return to Dust” falls into long periods in which absolutely nothing of note happens, and especially towards its latter half, often resorts to plot beats that appear time and time again in narratives about rural China. One can only take so many instances of watching conniving city folk and officials trying to take advantage of what they believe are two uneducated farmers with no common sense. Praise must be given to the film’s lead performers, though. The growth of Iron and Guiying’s relationship is conveyed almost entirely through the raw physicality of Wu and Hai’s performances, through Iron’s strong arm steadying Guiying as she hobbles uncertainly across mottled terrain; through the slumping of shoulders and the touching of skin. Had they been cast in a less grating narrative, I would have enjoyed watching them a lot more.
I can’t help but wonder if this was as well-received as it was because the film festival circuit (and perhaps the world at large) is still eager to see depictions of pastoral Chinese poverty; of typified ruddy-faced peasants toiling away in the fields. While admittedly the narrative never truly devolves into poverty torture porn for piteous Western neoliberals, “Return to Dust” often steers close to doing so, especially through the laborious blood-donation subplot that stinks of shallow class commentary, and not to mention the utterly contrived “tragic” ending for which there is no rhyme or reason (except possibly to allow for more slow contemplative scenes spent eating eggs in silence). But, as with most films that dare to convey a negative image of China, “Return to Dust” has already been pulled from national cinemas and streaming platforms in its home country after daring to premiere during National Day week. Pity that the writing itself isn’t nearly as brash or novel as such a stunt.
“Return to Dust” receives its U.S. premiere at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival on October 13, 2022.
