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Complete first draft for Slant Magazine.
In the realm of Chinese independent cinema, the weight of influence can be felt as heavily as the often capricious and inscrutable government censorship system. Unique among the most significant of the Nouvelle Vagues across the world, Mainland China possesses both a definable New Wave, the vaunted Fifth Generation of luminaries such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, and an equally clear countermovement in the form of the Sixth Generation, which comprised Jia Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai among others. Broadly speaking, the latter responded to the former's taste for florid aesthetic style, period pieces, and melodramatic narratives by embracing more rough-hewn, neorealist productions shot on the fly in contemporary China. While Chinese cinema has perhaps not reached the same level of (relatively) mainstream ubiquity as it possessed during the Fifth Generation's reign in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is arguably the Sixth Generation that has remained more directly influential in the 21st century, with Jia's work in particular acting as a paragon of the hybrid documentary-fiction form that has proved so key to the current international film landscape. To cast a Chinese film as being under the sign of one or the other movement is a pat comparison, but Li Ruijun's sixth feature Return to Dust favorably invites such comparisons. For one, by dint of its status as a Main Selection entry in the 2022 Berlin Film Festival, the film has an unusually visible place in a festival landscape that has moved away somewhat from Mainland Chinese film: only one or two Chinese films are selected In Competition each year across Berlin, Cannes, and Venice, with Return to Dust standing as just one of two in the 2020s (Wang Bing's Youth (Spring) at the just-concluded Cannes being the other). Though Li has worked steadily since his debut, The Summer Solstice, in 2007 (which he made when he was all of 24 years old), he has been a fairly unknown name in the West, unlike his fellow recent Competition brethren like Jia, Wang, or Lou Ye, who all hail from the Sixth Generation. It is not too much to say that, given the scant number of spots available, the film is situated in a curious place as the sole high-profile representative of a certain emerging strain of Chinese filmmaking that tends to be overlooked amid the commercial action extravaganzas and star-studded comedies on one hand, the stalwart auteurs on the other, that typify the West's general understanding of the filmmaking of the world's largest nation. These are expectations too great for any film to shoulder, but Return to Dust does so with grace, in the process almost coming across as a hybrid of Fifth and Sixth Generation approaches. The film concerns itself with a central couple living in a rural village in Gaotai, Li's native county in Northwestern China. Ma (Wu Relin), a humble farmer, and Cao (Hai Qing), a meek woman suffering from chronic incontinence, are thrust together in an arranged marriage to make way for further arrangements that the film pointedly abandons thereafter. Instead, aside from a few running strands — including a wealthy landowner who, due to his rare blood type, requires regular transfusions from Ma to stay alive and be able to buy the village's crops — the rest of the 133-minute runtime concerns itself with the arc of this tender relationship formed by greedy exterior forces, focusing more on steady daily progress than on significant landmark moments. Amid these tasks, Return to Dust's characters don't so much develop as they deepen, becoming more acclimated to the possibilities that this union may provide for them and their new freedom from past abusive families. Through the course of the film, Ma remains consistently caring to a fault for his wife, always insistent on helping others and repaying his debts despite other's assurances that he doesn't owe anything. Cao's appreciation, as is typical in this fairly taciturn film, is only verbalized in a few moments, leaving the viewer to observe the wonder in her eyes. This approach to narrative, which might be considered closer to the quotidian concerns of Sixth Generation films, is deftly counterbalanced by Li's visual style. Taking full advantage of both the wide-open arid landscapes and the dark interiors, and frequently using a distinctive piece of clothing (particularly the bright blue headscarf that Cao often wears) as a focal point, the carefully composed and eye-catching frames hew closer to the sumptuous images of the Fifth Generation. This especially comes to the fore in the centerpiece of the film: Ma's construction of their mud house, which slowly comes together over the course of the film and includes a memorable passage where he and Cao scramble in the night to prevent them from being ruined by the rain. Return to Dust can verge on being too simple in its concerns, especially in the blunt dichotomy it sets up between this lovingly crafted house and the anonymous city apartment that Ma's brother wants them to move to, but it is best in these physical moments, when the bond between these two outcasts is made corporeal and fully present. An especially shockingly unsentimental plot development around the three-quarter mark emphasizes the value of Li's quasi-hybrid approach, where the dedication to the rhythms of life must carry on in the face of the unexpected. That Return to Dust has become tacitly banned in China after a few successful weeks in theaters and on streaming is only too fitting: as the ending makes clear, no matter how strong people and structures may appear, they are as fragile as the earth they come from.
