Review | Berlin 2024: Above the Dust – Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai evokes Christopher Nolan in history-minded rural drama
- Above the Dust follows 10-year-old Wo Tu, who lives in a village in northeast China and wants his father to return home, hopefully bringing him a water pistol
- He embarks on a surreal journey through his dead grandfather’s memories from the 1950s, looking at his appalling actions through Christopher Nolan-like scenes
3.5/5 stars
Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai has dedicated a lot of his career to hard-hitting dramas about the drastic social and historical changes of his country. Who would have thought his latest film would lead to comparisons with Christopher Nolan’s blockbusters?
But that’s what Above the Dust entails, as its young protagonist’s dreams take the shape of an Inception-like journey through his recently deceased grandfather’s long-submerged, guilt-ridden memories of his life – including a key scene, à la Interstellar, in which he peers through a window frame to observe some of the old man’s appalling misdeeds.
What remains unchanged, however, is Wang’s determination to evoke obscured historical traumas that remain influential in shaping China’s national psyche today.
Above the Dust revolves around Wo Tu (Ouyang Wenxin), a 10-year-old living in a dusty, impoverished village in northwestern China. While not contending with sandstorms or helping his mother (Yong Mei) with housework, the boy yearns for just one thing: a plastic water pistol which would allow him to bond with his friends.
The unnervingly pragmatic Wo Tu decides to starve his bedridden grandfather (Li Feng) in the hope of getting his migrant-worker father (Zu Feng) to return home early with the toy. Instead, the old man then tells his grandson he would return in the boy’s dreams after his death to help fulfil his wish.
Wo Tu soon finds himself plunging repeatedly into what seems to be his dead grandfather’s reveries, in which the old man observes his younger 1950s self helping party cadres plunder his ancestral home for hidden wealth, and leading his village to doom with misguided attempts to produce steel from makeshift furnaces.
But history is also repeating itself in real life as farce. Shady village cadres are shown coercing Wo Tu’s family to give their land up for better schools and better jobs in the city.
Learning of the dead grandfather offering tips about buried family heirlooms from the grave, distant relatives barge in and remove valuable goods – the TV, the refrigerator – as some kind of reparation.
Wang’s decision to reinvent his cinematic language certainly deserves some praise, but he seems yet to find a neat balance between all the different tones and styles he tries to apply to his story.
Ironically, Above the Dust is at its most mundane when he reverts to his much tried-and-tested brand of social realism – specifically the final denouement driven by tragedy and despair. It’s better perhaps for Wang to dream on and dream more.
