The movie “Return to Dust” (隐入尘烟) was first shown at the Berlinale, the Berlin international film festival, in February 2022. It was released in cinemas in China in July 2022. Initial box office sales were very small. Surprisingly, through word of mouth, more and more people started talking about it and watching it. By now, its box office performance is the best of the past weekend.
You can watch its Trailer |Return to Dust (Yin Ru Chen Yan) | Berlinale 2022 or the entire movie with English subtitle on YouTube. It lasts 2h 10mn.
Full disclosure, I have not seen it and dont’plan to.
I am introducing it for two reasons, I want to summarize how Chinese people see it, I also want to put it in contrast with the rest of the world.
From Screen Daily:
Set in a Gansu village circa the early 2010s, it chronicles the arranged union between Ma Youtie (Wu Renlin) and Cao Guiying (Hai Qing). Both are well into middle age and have been matched by their families as a means of relieving domestic burdens since they still live with relatives. Although respected for his hard-working nature, the humble Ma is one of the poorest members of the community, while the withdrawn Cao has been bullied since childhood and suffers from a loss of bladder control.
As the seasons change, Ma and Cao grow closer by facing whatever life throws at them. Since he possesses a rare blood type, Ma is asked to make debilitating donations to aid the medical treatment of the businessman who props up the local farming economy. There is also the task of building a new home as an initiative to improve countryside living standards entails that the house provided with the arranged marriage will be demolished in exchange for modest compensation.
In the end, (spoiler alert), Cao died when she fell into a pond on the way to bring food to Li, and the villagers watched her drown without trying to help. Li decided to end his life.
Gansu is a landlocked province in north west China, famous for its poverty. It is also where the directer, Li Ruijun grew up.
On twitter, I found a thread in English that gave quite good summary on the production of the film:
‘Return To Dust’ is an award winning movie about the very poor in rural China. Lots of Chinese citizens thought it was over dramatized just to win foreign awards & make China look bad. State media had to step in & say, no, ppl do live like this, it’s you guys who are out of touch.
it’s unclear which award the movie won.
Indeed. A scholarship I ran in Shaanxi, China until 2015 had kids who were better off, but still lived in dirt huts and needed to walk daily 1⁄2 mile for well water. The male lead of this film only ate one egg his entire life… it was too precious to consume as food.
I haven’t seen the film yet but know the plot, it’s very heavy. The main actress, who’s famous, did it for no cost bc the director could not raise money. Everyone else in the film, incl the male lead, are his relatives, real villagers, not actors. A feat.
Main actress is Hai Qing. She is also National UN Women Ambassador Hai Qing.
To bring this back to biz… I’m not the only one to emphasize that there are multiple Chinas (divided along lines of wealth) & the rural life is often foreign to the urban entrepreneur. That’s why Kuaishou & PDD were surprises, & they target users way richer than in this film.
Kuaishou (in Chinese: 快手; ‘quick hand’) is a video-sharing mobile app.
U.S.-listed Pinduoduo (PDD:NASDAQ) is now the third-largest e-commerce player behind Alibaba and JD.com in China, its main feature is the group buying function where the more people buy a product the lower its price. Originally axed around selling agricultural product, you can now buy everything on PDD. They just launched Temu in the US.
Really glad ppl discovering this tweet. Interesting fact: this is the director’s 6th film. He used to be butt of villager’s jokes, until they saw his first film, saw what art was & how worthwhile it was. Since then, bc he has no $, he’s been casting villagers in all his films.
As mentioned, this film has only 1 professional actress (female lead Hai Qing). Everyone else is a villager. By this 6th attempt, villagers lining up to be in film. They understand this is the only way to leave a sort of lasting mark in this world. Otherwise they’re forgotten.
Another thing: the movie took 10 mos to film, in part bc director wanted to reflect the reality of the seasons. The planting was filmed during planting season, harvest during harvest season. There is respect for the land, the passing of time & the reality of these farmers’ lives.
The quote that sums up the movie:
“Blown around by the wind, what can the wheat say? Pecked by flying sparrows, what can the wheat say? Being eaten by the donkey, what can the wheat say? Cut off by the sickle of summer, what can the wheat say?”
This is a film about the wheat.
Here are some different angles the commentators see the film I see on Chinese social media.
The story is very pure, the performance of the cast is very good, especially the lead actress Hai Qing. Where can you find an actress that would play in a film like this? The emotions in the film is also very moving. But it does not measure up to be a great movie about China’s rural area.
After all, the director just want to tell a story in his way. The storyline and the emotions make sense, it is not amoral, and is not against the core value of socialism. The film does not sing praise of the society or criticize the society. That is okay. This is not the goal of the director.
While some people say this is very realistic, many doubt that the directer is deliberately making a presentation of the poverty and ugliness of the rural areas, to please foreign audience. This movie does not deal with the big pictures, just a story of two very small people, provoking empathy in the audience. In some sense, the director gives this group of people a chance to tell their own story.
This year, some people see the suffering from COVID Zero policy and the silencing of people. Some realized that the fact Ma and Cao never seek to rebel as a reflection of the reality in China: most people just endure the hunger and hardship that felt on them randomly without any way to rebel.
While Ma and Cao see themselves as wheat and see no way out of this life, many Chinese have long laughed at themselves and seen themselves as garlic chives (aka Chinese chives). Garlic chives grow rigorously and can be harvested by cutting above the roots. After each harvest, the chive will bounce back with more growth. So the metaphor is, the Chinese people is garlic chives: each time they grow their wealth, the CCP and the powerful will rob them like they harvest garlic chives. And then people will work hard and regrow their wealth, only to be harvested later again.
The stock market is one way to harvest the garlic chives wealth, the property development crisis is another, and rural bank scam is another one. Now the PCR test is just another way to enrich a few connected to the power at the expense of millions of people…
Dr. Li Wenliang, who warned his colleague of the SARS-like disease at the end of 2019, was ordered to shut up. He died after working in the hospital fighting COVID and contracted the disease himself. Almost three years after he died, his Weibo account still attracted many people to write to him. They wrote of the hardship of their daily life there. It is one place people don’t want to lose their ability to speak.
The movie is very mediocre. The director pretends he is describing normal life in the rural area. But, he actually beautified it throughout the movie. A woman who was bullied by her own family was married to a poor man. In reality, their life is like the movie? Men really like to pretend to be the saviour of women. Before, they will save prostitutes, now they save disabled women.
In the movie there is a stranger, who saw how the man took care of the woman, she said, “I am so envious of this disabled woman.” So, the woman is seemingly well taken care of, but her true self is disappeared. In reality, “being saved” is being in chains, “being taken care of” is also being in chain.
In a moment, the director implied this when the man took out a rope to tie the woman and himself together. This does not warm me up, this reminds me of the chained woman
See our newsletter 39 for more on the chained woman.
Remember the 11 minutes video that went viral on Chinese social media we talked about in newsletter 83?
Many people see the connection. In both stories, misery was endured without any desire for justice.
Last time, after I finished writing about Erjiu, I thought Erjiu is perhaps a Chinese version of Forrest Gump.
The Hollywood propaganda machine gave a much better image of the USA than these films do for China. Forrest manages to have an excellent life, even with his crooked spine and his low IQ. Erjiu manages to get nothing, the Chinese dream is you endure your hardship and die.
‘Return to Dust’ is also a reflection of the hopelessness of the ordinary people, their acceptance of life had to be so miserable. Many people are angry at the film because it seemed to say that there is nothing people can do about it.
I just happened to listen to two podcasts that are, somehow, related to the topic of the movie.
Outside China, intellectuals are rethinking the past century, looking for ways to make the world a better place for everyone. In some way, Brad DeLong is the opposite of Ma and Cao, because he cares deeply about the world and how the world should be, while Ma and Cao could not care less. But Mr. DeLong argues that a misery like the ones of Ma and Cao is totally avoidable in today’s world of high productivity.
You can listen to Prof. Sean Carroll interviewing him for his new book Mindscape 209 | Brad DeLong on Why the 20th Century Fell Short of Utopia.
I also found this lecture of Prof. DeLong providing a very good background for his book.
You can listen to the interview: In ‘Survival of the Richest,’ author Douglas Rushkoff examines the escape plans of the tech elite.
Super rich outside China are buying up underground bunkers in New Zealand, in case of a breakdown in social and environmental order. In some ways, these super rich is the opposite of the Ma and Cao, the poorest people on earth. They have immense social power to change the world for the better, yet, they not only refuse to do so, they profit from accelerating the global climate crisis so that they can live in a bunker for the rest of their lives. Go figure their rationale.
The book started as Survival of the Richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind and The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods.