Review: He ni zai yi qi (2002)
Jonathan F. Richards
TOGETHER
Written & Directed by Chen Kaige
Rated PG, 116 minutes, in Mandarin with subtitles
Marriage and fatherhood have made a happy man of Chen Kaige, the
writer/director who gave us "Farewell, My Concubine" and "The Emperor and the
Assassin". So for the moment at least, he's swept aside the tragedy that was
the underlying motif of his previous efforts, and given us a movie that
accentuates the positive and tugs at the heartstrings. And being Chen Kaige,
he's done it very well.
"Together" is a father-and-son bonding story. Chen starts us off in a
provincial town, where Xiaochun (Tang Yun) is a thirteen-year-old violin
prodigy in a very small pond. He's won every regional competition around, and
his music also has practical and regenerative applications -- he is summoned by
a local businessman to play for his wife through a difficult labor.
But Xiaochun's father, an obsequious cook named Cheng (Liu Peiqi), has
higher ambitions for his boy. And so off they go to Beijing for a big time
competition, only to discover that in the big city, the race is not always to
the swift, but to the well-heeled. Although Xiaochun is the best, a bribe
carries the day for another contestant.
But Cheng is not to be discouraged. He finds an apartment in Beijing,
where Xiaochun becomes infatuated with a beautiful neighborhood call girl named
Lili (Chen Hong, the director's wife). Cheng gets the boy accepted by a
teacher named Jiang (Wang Zhiwen) who lives on the poor side of town with his
cats in a dingy apartment strewn with dirty laundry and sad memories. The boy
and the teacher develop a strong relationship after a slow start, but about
this time the father decides that to really get ahead Xiaochun needs a
higher-powered tutor, and he gets the upscale Professor Yu (the director
himself) to take him on.
Studying with Yu is practically a ticket to stardom, especially for the
pupil selected to compete in the national competition. But Yu requires that
the boy move in with him, and Cheng prepares to go back home.
This movie spends a great deal of its time exploring contrasts and
choices. "I wanted to show the change taking place in China," Chen said in a
recent interview. "Some of it is for the good, some for the worse." He is
absorbed here by the yin and yang of old China butting heads with modern China.
There is a startling cut early in the film from the quiet, timeless beauty of
the little provincial town to the thrusting, glittering urban skyscrapers of
Beijing. The shift from Jiang's fusty digs to Yu's slick penthouse further
emphasizes the contrast. The film also contemplates the chasms between personal
values and commercial success, between the goals of art and the goals of fame.
"I can teach you violin," Jiang tells his pupil, "but not lead you to acclaim."
That is something Yu can accomplish, but only at the cost of severing the
ties of family. Family is a sensitive point with the boy - his mother, he has
been told, abandoned them when he was two years old. She left behind her
violin, and Xiaochun learned to play as a way of trying to recapture something
of his lost mother. There is more to that story, but you won't learn it from
me - all the strands are swept together in a conclusion ripe with melodrama,
but effective and satisfying, the sort of thing that those inclined to the
lachrymose may want to prepare for with a pocket pack of tissues. And once the
twists of the story are revealed, audiences may leave the theater speculating
on other possible implications of relationships in the story.
The movie is beautifully shot, with some exquisite footage of the
provincial village and impressive footage of modern Beijing. When Chen wants
to emphasize the values of a moment he tends to go to soft tones with halo-like
amber backlighting. But there is the suspicion that this may once have been a
longer movie, cut down for reasons unexplained. There are places where the
jumps in continuity are truly bewildering, and some of the editing feels as if
it had been done with chopsticks.
Chen works well with actors, and he has some impressive performances here.
Tang Yun gets across a believable and charming adolescent curiosity as
Xiaochun, and his dexterity on the violin is impressive (some of the music is
dubbed in, but the fingering and bowing is his.) Liu gives the father a comic
bumpkin quality which pushes toward excess in the early parts of the picture,
but finds its feet as the story progresses. The director and his wife are good
as Yu and Lili. But the laurels go to Wang as the morose Jiang, who comes
across as a sort of a scruffy Chinese Oscar Levant. When Xiaochun asks if he
ever has a woman over to his miserable rooms, he replies "If I brought a woman
here, my cats would have to go...." When he does finally decide to clean up
his act, it's as if he'd had a flash makeover from "Queer Eye for the Straight
Guy."
Some will find this movie excessively sentimental, but for those with a
soft spot, it is nicely rewarding. Of his outlook in earlier days, Chen says
"I didn't really have a chance to look up and see how blue the sky could be,
how beautiful the flowers were when I look down." Now that he's squared away
his personal life, perhaps we can expect more happy endings.
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