Chinese writer-director Li Ruijun’s moving drama traces the evolving relationship of two outcasts who defy expectations, making the best of an arranged marriage.
Return to Dust
, an unhurried but hypnotic portrait of two discards thrown together to scratch out a life as they weather the seasons. A lyrical slice of Chinese neorealism set in writer-director Li Ruijun’s northern birthplace of Gaotai, bordering Inner Mongolia, this is an elegiac story, a humanistic metaphor for a vanishing world seen through the prism of a vulnerable couple cruelly written off by their families as worthless encumbrances.
While Li doesn’t address the phenomenon directly, the film evokes news reports from the past decade or so of “ghost cities” rising all over rural China, where accelerated growth has outpaced demand as developers clear farming areas to make way for modern townships that remain underpopulated. The largest of these places, with hundreds of thousands of empty homes, sprang up out of the desert in Ordos, an area similar to where the story takes place.