Wang draws intimate links between the Chinese and their land post-1949 Chinese Civil War in this reflective and dreamlike work from the perspective of a boy who longs for a water toy gun from his late grandfather.
Review #2,981
Dir. Wang Xiaoshuai
2024 | China | Drama | 123min | 1.85:1 | Mandarin
M18 (passed clean) for sexual scene
Cast: Ouyang Wenxin, Yong Mei, Zu Feng, Jun Li, Wang Zichuan
Plot: Ten-year-old Wo Tu dreams of having a water pistol like the other boys in his village. His dying grandfather promises to grant him his wish once he is a ghost.
Awards: Nom. for Crystal Bear – Generation Kplus (Berlinale); Won Best Adapted Screenplay & Nom. for Best Art Direction (Golden Horse Awards)
International Sales: The Match Factory (SG: Anticipate Pictures)
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Post-1949 Chinese History; Communism; People and the Land; Urbanisation; Memory
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: The Projector Cineleisure
Spoilers: No
It is hard to top So Long, My Son, my favourite film of 2019, and director Wang Xiaoshuai is rightly under no illusion in attempting to do so.
With Above the Dust, which world premiered at the Berlinale last year, he gives us a more modest work, but one that still retains his capacity for making films that resonate with cinephiles desiring some kind of engagement with Chinese history and sociopolitics.
Rejecting self-censorship, Wang’s film tackles the migration of rural farmers to developing urban cities. A key theme, but not necessarily the only narrative thread, Above the Dust builds upon that by looking back into history and drawing intimate links between the Chinese people and their land.
At once dreamlike and realist, the film is bookended by strong gales, threatening to blow little Wo Tu away. The title suggests that the swirls of dust can never settle, such are the disruptive and often irreversible winds of change.
As such, one can only rise above it to see clearly, to float in some other dimension where memory and dreams conflate.
“How could a kid know about the Great Leap Forward?”
Wo Tu, a boy who longs for a water toy gun to fit in with his teasing friends, becomes privy to all that his late grandfather (returning as a ghost in the youngling’s sleep) had experienced during the post-1949 Chinese Civil War era.
With Mao’s brand of communism rearing its ugly head (or offering tantalising promises to many in those times), land became state-owned to be collectively farmed. So Wang, through the curiosity of an inquisitive boy guided by an old familial spirit, shows us how much China has changed over the decades.
Yet, the haunting spectre of the communist revolution remains embedded in the sand and soil, somewhere far away in the mountains, never to be dug up.
Above the Dust doesn’t quite judge whether the ideological and individual sacrifices and developments were worth it for the Chinese; instead, it takes a decidedly more reflective tone, suggesting that those vast lands that have been progressively emptied are well alive and breathing, with so many stories yet to be unearthed and hopefully carried away to the ends of time by those godforsaken winds.
Grade: B+
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 