a naturalistic Chinese rurality in a film censored in China

The rural film has been a genre in its own right in China since the 1950s, following the agrarian reform enacted the same year by Mao. Each decade has had its films adapted to each policy, with their dominant ones: reformist propaganda, mechanization, the place of women… In The Return of the Swallowsreleased Wednesday February 8, the Chinese director Li Ruijun follows a couple of farmers in difficulty following the economic priority given to industry and new technologies by Beijing.

subversive naturalism

A peasant tenant and single, Ma Yutie decides to get married late and marries Cao Guiying, a discredited spinster from the nearby village. Once the ice is broken, the two get to know each other and Wu develops a real affection for Hai-Quing who responds to it. But as the months and years pass, the rural world disintegrates. The authorities encourage people to go to the cities, which will have inevitable repercussions on their couple.

A big success in China when it was released in September 2022, Li Ruijun’s film was banned, then re-edited with a new ending, due to the director’s miserable vision of the Chinese rural world, while nearly 57% of the country’s land is agricultural. Himself from the countryside, Li Ruijun is in favor of a naturalist staging, considered subversive by a regime that does not tolerate any ambiguity as to the modernist image of the country intended for the international.

rural time

The film’s countryside is set on the edge of a strange sandy desert and is far from a town where Wu has never set foot. In this quasi-medieval context, the director shows the work in the fields, the construction of a house, or a community life reduced to a minimum. But above all it develops the blossoming of feelings that one would not expect from its protagonists. Just as he captures their poetry in Wu’s aphorisms, his minimalist interior decor, the love and protection he dedicates to his incontinence-stricken beloved, and the benevolent tenderness that brings them together. The film is wrapped in a dominant ocher from the earth, because it is everywhere.

As you might expect, it’s not the action that takes over. The Return of the Swallows – whose original title Return to Dust (back to dust) is more accurate, based on a contemplative rhythm that is more chronic than a plot. It evokes a rural time where the harshness of the earth is compensated by its beauty, with the vagaries of the seasons, the wait, the harvests and the conclusion of various transactions. But it is also the time of love which interferes, unexpectedly, between two outcasts who, for a time, live in communion. An enchanted parenthesis which turns out to be the true subject of this Return of the Swallows out of time.

The sheet

Gender : Drama
Director: Li Ruijun
Actors: Wu Renlin, Hai-Quing
Duration : 2h13
Exit : February 8 2023
Distributer : ARP Distribution

Summary: Ihe story of an arranged marriage between two beings despised by their families. Between them, shyness gives way to affection. Around them, rural life is falling apart…