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.