Director Li Ruijun’s ‘Return to Dust’ is an emotionally engaging movie with two utterly convincing performances by Wu Renlin and Hai Qing, as two farmers in an arranged marriage who gradually discover true mutual love, the film actually benefits from Li’s spare, unvarnished direction as its emotional palette grows by small degrees against a realistically drawn village background. Li gives the impression of being far more comfortable with his subject matter.
For the viewer, there are the usual difficulties of adjusting to the director’s slow, arty pace, the thick local dialect, and working out who exactly is who. But as these mists clear, the film settles down into what is basically an odd-couple story – the unambitious fourth brother of the Ma family, who doggedly farms a patch for his third brother and whose closest friend is his loyal donkey, and the lame, sterile, slightly hunchbacked Cao Guiying, who’s been bullied all her life and whom her elder brother and sister-in-law can’t wait to offload via a matchmaker. The two social outsiders are both as taciturn as each other but, as they go about their daily work with a peasant doggedness, they gradually discover a shared future, and their own kind of deep, mutual love.
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