Together (2003)

Directed by Kaige Chen
Written by Kaige Chen and Xiao Lu Xue
Starring Yun Tang, Peiqi Li, Hong Chen, Zhiwen Wang, Kaige Chen and Qing Zhang

I first saw the trailer for Together in June of 2003 (before Bend It Like Beckham) and I knew I had to see it. Unfortunately, I moved to Spain that same month and it was no use trying to see it in the theater there because it would have been in Chinese with Spanish subtitles. And that would have been useless.

After all this time I finally got around to seeing it. I wanted to see it with someone but I ended up watching Together alone.

Anyway, Liu Cheng (Peiqi Liu) is the personal chef for a wealthy man in a small town in China. His 13-year-old son, Liu Xiaochun (Yun Tang) is a violin prodigy who has won competitions every year. When he gets a chance to compete in Beijing, his father stuffs their life's savings in his orange beanie and they head for Beijing, hoping that they can find a good teacher for Xiaochun.

It's touching to see how hard Cheng will work to get his son positioned with a good teacher. He follows teachers to their homes, offers them gifts, flatters and begs. He would come off as a sleazy agent type if he wasn't so self-effacing and sincerely humble. He's definitely the type of father who would work in a grocery store for twenty years so that his son can go to Harvard. He has so much invested in his son that he says he can't watch him playing in a competition because he (the father) gets stage fright.

Xiaochun is a complex character. He has the same peasant work ethic as his father -- he works hard without being told and he has high standard of cleanliness that his first teacher doesn't live up to. But you can tell he wants more from his life than his father has gotten. You can see that he is ashamed of his peasant background. He has pictures of models hidden in his sheet music and has an exceptional eye for fashion.

The strength of China's capitalist market economy are displayed as two rice merchants literally fight for Cheng's business. In the scuffle, Cheng loses his hat and their life savings. He is able to find work at a restaurant -- but not as a chef, which is his training (and you suspect that he is a better chef than the restaurant's chef), but as a delivery boy. Xiaochun earns extra money playing and doing odd jobs for a call girl named Lili (played by Hong Chen, who is director Kaige Chen's wife) who lives down the street and is just as pretty and fashionable as any of the girls hidden in Xiaochun's sheet music.

Lili becomes Xiaochun's connection to the more sophisticated urban life while his first teacher Prof. Jiang (Zhiwen Wang), a perennially tousle-haired professor who lives with stray cats that he has taken in and has given up a domestic life for his music gives him the training to move on. He doesn't have the connections to make Xiaochun a star and so their professional relationship must end -- but his contact with Xiaochun has made him a better person.

Director Kaige Chen, who also directed Farewell My Concubine, plays Prof. Yu Shifeng who takes Xiaochun in and prepares him for a career as an international musician.

One of the beauties of the film are the good characters mentioned above that Xiaochun and his father meet in Beijing (though for a city as large as Beijing, people seem to bump into each other very often). It was also touching to see Lili and Professor Jiang walking Cheng to the train station. It signified that they recognized him as an extraordinary man.

What had first attracted me to this film was the ambition of two villagers living in the city with nothing but their talent and their will to survive keeping them going. However, there is a revelation toward the end of the film that makes this a film about grace and the gratitude as a response to a tremendous act of self-sacrifice that motivates good works. Cheng is like a Christ figure and Xiaochun offers an apt example of the Christian response to the Gospel.

In the end there is an imaginative twist on the clichéd dad-doesn't-love-me-because-he-didn't-come-to-my-performance/game ending (that a Spanish ad campaign ridiculed American films for having).

I highly recommend this film in a room with a good system. The soundtrack is amazing with original music by Ling Zhao and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. And Chen along with his cinematographers Jiongqiu Jin and Hyung-ku Kim match the sound with the images with incredible beauty.

A tremendous film.

By the way, Emily Litella would have loved this film.

Topkapi (1964)

Directed by Jules Dassin
Written by Eric Ambler (novel) and Monja Danischewsky (screenplay)
Starring Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov and Maximilian Schell

Don' t you hate it when you watch a movie and it is nothing like the book?

That's how I felt when I first started watching Topkapi, which was based on a novel by Eric Ambler, the father of modern spy novels. I guess I got into an espionage kick and read his book A Coffin for Dimitrios while I've been preparing to go to school. I don't know. Maybe with what I'll be learning I need to prepare myself for the posibility of writing spy fiction.

After Dimitrios I read Light of Day because I had read that they had already made a film out of it and that Pierce Brosnan was going to remake it as The Topkapi Affair.

Unfortunately, Jules Dassin, the director of the critically acclaimed 1955 heist movie Rififi--which I haven't seen yet--took a lot of liberty with the plot about a small-time English con-man in Athens named Arthur Simon Simpson who gets mixed up with upscale jewelry thieves who are planning a daring heist of the royal jewels in Istanbul. Along the way, Turkish security catches on to him and he is forced to spy on the thieves or else he'll get thrown into a Turkish prison.

While Ambler tells the story from Simpson's point-of-view, focusing on the espionage involved in taking down the gang of criminals, Dassin, who is American-born and was forced into exile in France after he was named as a communist before Congress, plays up the heist telling it from the thieve's point-of-view, with Simpson being just a part of the ensemble.

Peter Ustinov does an excellent job of portraying Simpson as the loser that Ambler portrayed him as. His mannerisms provide the heft of the subtle comedy in the film. During the heist someone tells him, I was afraid you lost you nerve. To which he replies, "It's not a question of losing my nerve; I never had nerve!"

The Austrian Maximilian Schell, who happens to be Angelina Jolie's godfater [I'll let the gentle reader decide what kind of a job he is doing], plays the Walter Harper, the Swiss leader of the gang, with a suaveness and surprises me that I haven't seen him in anything else. Melina Mercouri plays the femme fatale whose idea it is to steal the jewelry and tempts Simpson to join the gang. The Greek actress would marry Dassin and their marriage would last until her death in 1994. She was also became Greece's first female minister of culture in 1971.

I guess I might have reacted to the film differently if I hadn't read the book. Besides the change in the plot, even though there were comedic elements in the book it seemed like the film, as often seems to happen with films of that era, tried a lot harder to be funner and bordered on the slapstick. I don't know, maybe I just don't notice the comedy in books as much. It also didn't help that it began with the typical colorful 1960s imaginary that provided so much fodder for Mike Myers in the original Austin Powers.

Though Topkapi is apparently an acclaimed heist movie, I'm hoping that Pierce Brosnan--who was brilliant as a distraught hitman in The Matador--will stick closer to the Hitchcockian aspects of the book in his sequel to the The Thomas Crown Affair.