Return to Dust (Yin ru chen yan)

Writer/director Li Ruijun

RETURN TO DUST (Yin ru chen yan)                     B                                                                China  (131 mi)  2012  d: Li Ruijun

Not since Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis (2002) have we seen a more downbeat couple, featured in nearly every scene of this film, becoming a despairing portrait of an impoverished rural life in China that seemed to have made the Chinese government uncomfortable, strangely pulling it from all movie theaters and streaming services in China in the last week of September after developing a following, earning nearly $16 million since its July release.  According to the director, who also writes and edits the film, while also serving as the art director, “Everyone knows there are lots of poor people, but the government doesn’t want Chinese people to see too much of it.”  Shot on a modest budget, the film is set in the small, rural village of Huaqiangzi, the director’s hometown, in the distant province of Gansu, which borders Mongolia and the Great Gobi Desert.  All of the actors are local villagers, except for the leading female character.  The mud brick houses that distinguish the look of this film can be found everywhere in the region.  Wu Renlin, the lead actor in this film, is the uncle (husband of his mother’s sister) of director Li Ruijun.  Painfully honest and unsentimentalized, the film accentuates the gap between an indifferent wealthy class who drive luxurious cars and poor farmers who remain rooted to the land, recalling Youssef Chahine’s trailblazing early Egyptian film The Blazing Sun (Siraa Fil-Wadi) (1954), both identifying with the arduous work in the fields of the farmers, whose steadfast devotion to producing seasonal crops is a labor of love, yet they are continuously harassed and exploited by the rich, who view them as less than human, inflicting immeasurable suffering with no hesitation whatsoever, typically viewed as an impediment to their own path to success.  This epic film humanizes the downtrodden, the poorest of the poor, painting a portrait of two outcasts who are brought together in an arranged marriage, an improbable middle-aged pair, the fourth brother, the reserved Ma (Wu Renlin), a poor farmer who only owns one donkey, and the disabled and unmarried Guiying (Hai Quing), who are both openly spoken about as a burden to their families.  He is a reticent farmer, the last of his family to remain unmarried, while she is severely crippled, enduring a long history of inflicted family abuse where she was tortured and beaten by her brothers, unable to have children, walking with a limp, barely able to move her right arm, with uncontrollable bladder issues, well past what is considered to be a marrying age in rural China.  Glad to be rid of them, their families view the marital resolution as a relief, an answer to their own problems, no longer concerning themselves with either one of them.  Left on their own, they can be a pitiful sight, rarely ever saying a word, showing no familiarity whatsoever in their wedding photograph, where their first night together is a disaster.  Something of a slow and plodding film, the film details how farmers borrow from landowners before planting their crops, mostly wheat or corn, then sell their harvested goods back to the owners, who keep for themselves a tidy profit, setting prices that often reflect their own avarice and greed, in stark opposition to the unassuming modesty of this couple, whose humble origins are never in doubt, defined by the backbreaking hard work they perform day in and day out. 

With so many American films using computer generated effects as the gold standard, there is something refreshing about the physicality and harsh realism of the landscapes, transporting viewers to a different time and space.  Recalling the fifth generation of Chinese cinema, this is a return to the visual poetry of Chen Kaige’s YELLOW EARTH (1984), the rural traditions of Zhang Yimou’s RED SORGHUM (1988) and the peasant realism of THE STORY OF QIU JU (1992), as the brutal realism and poetic tenderness of this story merge into an elegiac drama, a delicate and touching parable about human nature that takes a rather pessimistic look at contemporary China, which is at odds between modernity and tradition, as rarely do viewers get to see the lives of people living in such remote surroundings.  It is important for them to be seen and understood, as the best of centuries-old local traditions are disappearing due to rapid urbanization, providing preserved memories hidden under the dust.  Despite the humanist depiction, the misery and poverty porn index can feel one note, feeling overlong and overly predictable, grating on one’s patience, literally immersing viewers in the dire situation of their lives, never having any time for themselves  Persistently seen selflessly toiling in the fields where adversity is almost always present, a seasonal rhythm of their lives is established through their grueling work, plowing a field in the spring, flooding it, then planting the seeds, nurturing their growth during the heat of the summer before harvesting the crops in the fall, all in unison with their tireless donkey, who becomes part of the family, eventually expanding to include chickens and pigs.  Viewing simplicity as a virtue, these rituals not only show how time-consuming and exhausting this work is, but also how carefully it is carried out, with the work bringing them closer together, as does food, which is an everpresent aspect of their lives, routinely seen eating steamed buns, with Guiying often bringing him fresh water in the fields.  There is an oddly intrusive presence that continually interrupts their lives when the wealthy landowner falls ill and needs so-called “Panda” blood, a rare Rh-negative blood type, with Ma the only one in the village with matching blood, so an extravagant silver BMW car is sent to fetch him each time he needs more blood, a cruel metaphor that symbolizes his continuing exploitation, used for their own self-serving purposes.  As a reward for donating blood, they are told to move into a newly built urban apartment complex that is cold and unwelcoming, used strictly for propaganda purposes, with the media capturing this gesture as an act of good will helping bridge the divide between the past and the future, yet when Ma views the apartment, he is less than thrilled, as there is no place for the farm animals, and he’s nowhere near his land, so this would essentially be an exile from where he wants to be.  This same subject was thoroughly explored in Jia Zhang-ke’s STILL LIFE (2006), and again during the recent Winter Olympics in Beijing, when many villages and settlements had to be demolished to make way for newly constructed sports facilities.  What this accentuates is how little the rich actually understand about the poor, as Ma is not ungrateful, but he doesn’t need a new apartment, which would be utterly meaningless to him, as he’s not an urban businessman, but a farmer who makes his living tending to the soil.  This old-fashioned occupation is completely inconceivable to the wealthy classes, never giving it a thought, as it’s simply not part of their mindset.  Making money is all that matters to them.  Ma may as well be invisible.       

In keeping with this theme, a rural exodus has caused a vacancy crisis in poorly built and unoccupied houses that have been abandoned, with owners migrating to the cities in search of work, leaving too many unused, dilapidated houses, so the government implements a plan to improve the appearance of the village, offering a cash incentive to owners who allow the demolition of their homes.  Ma and Guiying are forced to move from building to building, as owners return requesting the money, with the homes destroyed the instant they leave.  Not only do they bring their belongings, but they also transport a swallow’s nest, continuing a connection with the natural world around them.  Tired of continually having to move, Ma decides to build his own home, making the mud bricks himself, along with old wooden posts salvaged from the demolitions.  This is a painstakingly slow process that becomes the centerpiece of the film, accentuating each and every step, forming them into bricks, laying them out into the sun, building block by block as they laboriously construct their home, the first sign of their own freedom, with both never imagining they would have their own home.  This is the closest they ever come to happiness, yet when the bricks are threatened from a torrential rain, they struggle to cover and protect them, seen splashing around together in the puddles on the ground, probably the first sign we see of laughter.  A burgeoning tenderness can be found in small, everyday gestures, like Ma finding his wife a warm coat, or handing her food, or when Guiying runs to meet her husband on the road late at night after an excursion into the city in frozen wintry conditions, handing him a hot water bottle to help fend against the cold, something she’s repeatedly reheated to keep it warm.  Yet the most striking image that stands out is the moment they hatch their first eggs, placed in a cardboard box with holes in it, with the light reflecting on the darkened walls of their home, appearing like a constellation of stars, both marveling at the beauty they have created by such a simple gesture, with the birth of the chicks emulating warmth and hope for the future.  Another heartbreaking moment is the liberation of the donkey, something of a Bressonian Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) moment, as Ma releases him and sets him free, “You were used by others for most of your life, haven’t you had enough,” but it has no idea what is happening, seen returning back to the home on its own, knowing only a world that shows little compassion for him, one often dominated by human cruelty.  Essentially a love story, a heartfelt tribute to the human ability to find comfort in one another, the film is marked by the passing of the seasons, developing a symbiotic relationship with the natural world around them.  There are some noticeable editing lapses near the end, perhaps representative of forced changes made at the last minute, as the film was a target of China’s censors, creating alternate endings before the film was pulled from theaters.  Yet it is these two essential characters that dominate the screen time, taking viewers on a distant journey.  Ma is righteous, loyal, hardworking, and true to his word, yet as hard as their simple lives are, Ma and Guiying almost never complain, conscientiously carrying out their activities dutifully and stoically. Working together in such close proximity only makes them appreciate the other more, as both are selflessly devoted.  The care, warmth, and muted tenderness that they wordlessly express to each other is supported by close-ups, while also characterized by natural light and warm colors, beautifully captured by cinematographer Wang Weihua, shot over the course of a year, making extensive use of wide shots, showing a surprising restraint, reminding viewers of what really matters, as it’s not so much what you have, but who you have in your life.     

Eijanaika

 

Director Shôhei Imamura

actor Shigeru Izumiya

actress Kaori Momoi

EIJANAIKA              A-                                                                                                                  aka: Why Not?                                                                                                                             aka:  What the Hell?                                                                                                                    Japan  (151 mi)  1981  ‘Scope  d: Shôhei Imamura                                                               

The world is cruel when it is changing. 

The title translates to “What the hell?”, a masterful, unforgettable historical epic about the eijanaika riots in 1867, displaying a brief glimpse of people power in the Edo era as the Tokugawa Shogunate, a military dictatorship that ruled for more than 700 years, gave way to the Meiji Restoration, effectively ending the Shogunate’s 264-year feudal system, while doors to the West were just starting to crack open.  Commodore Perry’s visit to Yokohama harbor a decade earlier helped destabilize a strict social order, opening doors of commerce, where mismanagement at local levels led to widespread corruption and criminality.  Some of this was difficult to follow, as you couldn’t keep track of which side each character was on, perhaps intended to all be a blur, as local warlords and masterless samurai were battling the Emperor for control of the country, but most of this is told through ordinary people or those on the fringes of society, becoming an extremely compelling and cynical look at how both government and business collude with samurai soldiers and thugs, whoever is available, to protect their interests, while the underclasses scurry about trying not to be crushed by the changing vanguards of power.  In this film, political loyalties and personal relationships disintegrate, as the only certainty is money, where money is power, but power is constantly shifting.  The story follows Genji (Shigeru Izumiya, a rock ‘n’ roll singer), poor and rootless, who dreams of migrating to America where he can be a farmer and own his own land, yet he’s constantly besieged by his own confusion, among the more bewildering Japanese characters in cinema, while the same can be said for his more sexualized wife, Ine, played by Kaori Momoi, Hirohito’s wife in Sokurov’s THE SUN (2005), also appearing in Doris Dörrie’s Greetings from Fukushima (Grüsse aus Fukushima) (2016), who has become an alcoholic with a constantly changing mindset, routinely shifting her position, yet always remaining steadfastly loyal, despite all the sexual shenanigans she’s forced to endure, never really crawling out from the carnal world that engulfs her, remaining something of a puzzlement throughout, known for performing salacious sexual acts at a decadent street carnival owned by Kinzo (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi), a gangster boss who controls local criminal business interests.  Everyone seems to be owned and controlled and manipulated by corrupt powers.  Moral behavior, rules of a civilized society, are nowhere to be found.  Absent is the refined, more controlled aristocratic Buddhist culture, which reveals what it means to be Japanese as seen through the eyes of Mizoguchi or Ozu, who mentored Imamura, working as the second assistant director on Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) (1953), yet the precise, regimented style did not suit him, with characters rendered completely powerless and artificial in this world, replaced by a Shinto spirit that is more magical, raw and primitive, revealing a lower class world of frenzied sexuality and irrepressible energy, driven by forces outside themselves to criminal behavior, and ultimately to a class revolution, spurring the open acts of rebellion and riots shown at the end of the film.  While based on a historical reality, the Ee ja nai ka riots, Imamura’s vision is purely fictional, with no real interest in exploring what led to this condition, or why various factions are so distrustful and at odds with each other, growing delirious with near-hallucinogenic exaggeration, becoming a defiantly fatalistic protest expressing society running amok, creating a spectacular, bravura finale that far outweighs anything that precedes it, with “Eijanaika” becoming more of a projected state of mind, becoming an epic design of massive scale, and something not easily forgotten.    

After a series of movies in the 50’s and 60’s, Imamura, a provocative filmmaker still relatively unknown outside Japan, spent the decade of the 70’s making documentaries for television, known for his sympathetic portrayals of the poor and socially outcast, expressing a deep interest in folklore and mythology, while displaying a deep distrust in societal authority, where the surface conceals the underlying forces of power, money, and sex.  Becoming disillusioned how significantly the camera alters a documentary reality, he returned to feature filmmaking with VENGEANCE IS MINE (1979), a true story of a serial killer before making this film, written ten years earlier, his first period film and one that stares straight into the eye of his own nation’s history, without a hint of nostalgia for the past, or anything resembling a hero, questioning what really motivates a developing country, creating a sprawling, large-scale epic canvas and a unique historical film taking place in 1866, revealing the turmoil leading up to the Meiji Restoration, when the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown in favor of a 14-year old emperor.  Unlike other revolutions sparked by uprisings of the lower classes, this was a shift of power from the top, from the positions of privilege, which included the samurai class.  While poverty was widespread, inflation was rampant, causing social institutions to crumble into the economic and political chaos of the times, where criminal activity only escalated, with gangs controlling feudalistic criminal operations, then prosecuting those who those same officials persuaded to act in their behalf, making promises they can never keep, leaving behind a series of neverending casualties, some shown with extreme realism, leaving peasants impotent with rage, with the film literally exploding with movement and color, shot by cinematographer Shinsaku Himeda, exaggerated by a hyper-realistic emotional hysteria of abstract expressionism that guides the film.  Getting underneath the serene nature of Japanese culture, Imamura exhibits a kind of disruptive cinema, with a swarm of characters dominating the screen, essentially an unconventional love story between Genji and Ine, both caught up by historical events, swallowed up into a lifetime of poverty.  Ine’s family sells her to a carnival owner to stave off starvation after her husband Genji disappears in a shipwreck, a sign of the economic desperation of the times, with Ine becoming Kinzo’s mistress and starring performer in his sexual cavalcade of titillating interests known as Tickle the Goddess, where men take turns trying to blow a paper streamer between her legs, a metaphor for their sexual prowess, often left deflated.  Strangely, she differentiates herself from the other women who work as prostitutes, preferring to think of herself as an artist, yet she’s caught between two worlds as well, a willing pawn to Kinzo’s sexual exploits, yet also a comic heroine in Genji’s continual misadventures.  The assortment of weird and grotesquely surreal sideshow acts is baffling, creating discordant images, like the presence of a camel, an animal never before seen in Japan, being led by Arab handlers, shot with a claustrophobic lens, where viewers find themselves immersed in a throwback to the vulgarity and bawdiness of Chaucer’s Middle Ages The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury) (1972), where nudity is on full display, conveying the confusion and instability of the era. 

Genji was shipwrecked on his way to Yokohama, rescued by an American vessel, spending six years in America before returning back to Japan, where he immediately kisses the soil before being thrown into jail, suspected of being a Christian, eventually escaping where he discovers his long lost wife in a carnival show working in the sleazy quarters of the East Ryogoku district in Edo (present-day Tokyo), an area along the riverside rampant with pickpockets, beggars, prostitutes, dwarves, lady wrestlers, snake eaters, and slave traders, with Kinzo on the payroll of both the Shogunate and the Emperor, playing both sides against each other, with no distinguishable differences between either side, so it’s hard to say who is the controlling force, further complicating the myriad of plot twists.  With Genji having no means of support, he goes to work for Ginzo, eventually buying back his wife, using his English language proficiency to act as a go-between with Americans, who are selling guns to both sides, and local gangsters, hoping to save enough money to return to America with his reluctant wife, evolving into bumbling slapstick ineptitude when he decides to become a thief.  The fact that the United States is also the country helping to oppress the Japanese peasantry is one of the central ironies of the film, with the Shogunate replacing samurai swords with an infantry armed with shooting rifles sold by Americans.  Much like a novel, there are detours and subpolots, with a multitude of characters introduced, much of which is difficult to follow, with suggestions that some crude edits may have chopped off some of these tangential storylines from an already lengthy film, including Furukawa (Ken Ogata), a samurai-for-hire who gets involved in some unethical assignments, used by the Shogunate as a hired killer, yet he also has a fatalistic death wish involving a double suicide with his blind mistress.  A far cry from Kurosawa’s noble samurai and traditional Japanese insistence on dedication to the nation, it’s the corruption of the samurai class, in particular, that feels most ethically depraved, as their severe Buddhist training helped to shape their meticulous standards of conduct, so to see it undermined by gangsters with so little respect for human life reveals the extent of the deep-seeded societal corruption, where local Shogun clans are fiercely fighting to protect their feudal interests from the Imperial throne, with a nation already in a state of flux by opening doors to the West for the first time after 200 years of enforced isolation.  This film shares a certain commonality with VENGEANCE IS MINE, as both share a similar vision of people as helpless pawns of society.  For the poor, they have nothing left, as the moral rot at the top of the government has stolen their future, where “What the hell?” becomes their rallying cry, with suggestions that Japan has a hidden history of spontaneous protest, as Imamura perhaps advocates for more of the same addressing modern era concerns, “My greatest obsession was individual freedom — the condition that the state had denied us absolutely during the war years — and I became fascinated by existentialism.”  Ine opens a French Can-Can revue which takes to the streets, like a 1960’s living theater, singing and dancing and cavorting in a display of sexually explicit, orgiastic revelry rivaling any Mardi Gras spectacle, which makes for an astonishing film experience, with hundreds upon hundreds of people dressed in crazy costumes, wearing outlandish makeup, filling the ‘Scope widescreen with an explosion of colors bursting with energy as the streets are filled by the carnivalesque, clownish revelers who continuously dance and sing “Eijanaika,” throwing flowers at the armed-to-the-hilt authorities, flaunting their freedom in numbers by refusing to disperse, overflowing across a bridge which separates Edo’s rich and poor districts.  Instigated by anti-Shogunate forces to mask their plans for a coup d’état, it backfires into a chaotic street frenzy of looting and celebration that also includes the women mooning the rifle-toting army challenging them to shoot, creating a moment of “empty” freedom, a freedom of those who have lost everything and have nothing to lose, where government authority is meaningless, where only anarchy exists.