Music lessons
Family melodrama and
melodic pathos, Together again.
By David Fear
WHY IS IT that the violin is most often the
musical melodrama's weapon of choice? Is it the keening wail coaxed out
of its compact body, or the ability to crescendo so easily, that makes
it the perfect match for those torrid tales of love and loss? Forget the
Pavlovian reaction one gets when those string-laden scores pound viewers'
enslaved endocrine systems into submission; focus instead on the many
supporting roles the instrument has played, from the slums-to-riches sensitivity
of Humoresque (competing with, and nearly beating, Joan Crawford's
screeching for the higher registers) to the psychological pas-de-deux
referee of Claude Sautet's Un coeur en hiver. It's a nearly fail-safe
golden rule: When you want to get the audience going, reach for the Stradivarius.
The shapely, four-stringed starlet racks up another screen credit in
Together, playing second fiddle to a father-son story that's
as old as the proverbial hills. Still, it's given quite the hero's entrance
when the film's protagonist, a 13-year-old wunderkind named Xiaochun
(Tang Yun), is summoned to the side of a local woman in the midst of
a painful labor. Her baby refuses to come out, so it's up to Xiaochun
to inspire the infant to leave the womb. Out comes the violin, and a
dozen beautifully executed bowings later, he's dueting with a crying
newborn. It's a trick not even Itzhak Perlman has been able to successfully
pull off.
The boy's father (Liu Peiqi) is a working-class cook, a bit dim-witted
but kindhearted enough to know that his boy deserves better than a life
in the sticks. So he and the prodigy leave the provinces for Beijing,
where the boy quickly aces the musical academy's competition yet only
places fifth. "Even if he plays great," the school's resident
eccentric-genius teacher (Wang Zhiwen, whose withering looks are worth
a thousand arpeggios) tells them, "He'll never win.... you understand?"
The father is dogged, however, and convinces the professor to give the
boy private lessons. It's not the last time the two-man family will
face an obstacle that tests their resolve or references their past.
Director Chen Kaige was the first of China's Fifth Generation filmmakers
to put the Beijing Film Academy's class of '82 on the map, virtually
resurrecting international interest in Chinese cinema with his 1985
debut feature, Yellow Earth. Music plays a central role in many
of his films (the field-hollering farmers of Earth, the traveling
troubadour of Life on a String, the Chinese Opera-tics of Farewell,
My Concubine), but the issues of class conflict and displacement
are the twin harmonies that recur in Chen's arias. Consider the director's
history – he was taken out of a middle-class school during his
youth and forced to toil on a farm alongside peasant "reeducators"
during the Cultural Revolution – and it's no surprise that his
work concentrates on the bumps in his country's rocky road. Nor is it
shocking it drew the ire of the nation's legendary censor board, which
forced the director to camouflage his methods of criticism carefully.
This may explain why, after constant run-ins over his lush period spectacles
of late, the filmmaker mutes his jabs at contemporary society within
a simple, sappy story of musical aspirations and family pathos. The
digs are still present, if ambivalent, in the form of Lili (Chen Hong),
a superficial gold digger who initially pays Xiaochun to play sonatas
as background music to her cell-phone conversations, and Professor Yu
(Chen himself), a yuppie svengali who cages his star pupil in a fortress
of Ikea-like blandness. If one reads in Chen's relationship with his
own father, the noted pre-Revolution filmmaker Chen Huai'ai, it's easier
to see the narrative's paternal conflicts and reconciliations as politicized:
Like many students forced into zhiqing duty, Chen was goaded
into denouncing his parents and, as Tony Rayns's landmark essay on new
Chinese cinema points out, the elder Chen actually tried to block his
son's Beijing Film Academy application from being accepted.
But it's not that Together's lack of discernible political critique,
critique that's prevalent in much of the director's other work, is the
cause of disappointment so much as the film's rote treatment of its
subject. The father strikes a Faustian bargain with Yu in order to secure
a bright future for Xiaochun and erase the boy's embarrassing bumpkin
roots, yet the stacked deck ensures family will win out over materialism.
Both Wang's curmudgeonly teacher and the grating Lili are magically
transformed simply by exposure to the boy's guileless charm and the
soaring notes he wrings from his battered instrument. And even with
an impeccable visual eye, Chen's cover of the old boy-and-his-dad standard
relies too much on the emotional heft of cinema's musical muse, an instrument
that's seemingly bound not with horsehair but with heartstrings aching
to be plucked raw. One wishes the director had tuned up before playing
or, barring that, at least chosen a worthy key for the warhorse concerto.
As it is, Together's lesson seems over before it's really
even begun.
'Together' opens Fri/30 at Bay Area theaters. See
Movie Clock,
in Film listings,
for show times.
