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Not Lukas Moodysson's communal comedy but the latest offering from Fifth Generation flunky Chen Kaige, Together is a sweet, cliché-riddled, true story about how it's better to trust a country man than a town man. It's also a slight step in the right direction for Kaige (The Emperor and the Assassin) after a string of post-Farewell My Concubine lapses (including an English-language film with Heather Graham that ended up going straight to video). Hey, they can't all be Zhang Yimou now, can they?
Together, like Shine minus the child abuse, offers 13-year-old protagonist Xiaochun (Tang Yun), a motherless violin prodigy who lives in the sticks with his hard-working father Cheng (Liu Peiqi). Looking to further his boy's musical education, they load up the truck and move to Beijing, where Xiaochun does well in a competition and catches the eye of judge-slash-music teacher Jiang (Wang Zhiwen). Jiang, who has never quite recovered from losing his best girl to a rival fiddler back in the day, is a perpetually disheveled mess with Einstein hair, socks that don't match, and rumpled clothes, all of which mean he can only be a Mad Scientist, an English Professor, or a Music Teacher.
Most of Together focuses on Cheng's decision between continuing to train his son with the extremely unconventional Jiang (think Mr. Myagi) or attempting to have him coached by the Vince Lombardi of the Beijing string scene, Professor Shifeng Yu (played by Kaige). Yu, who lives in a fancy high-rise (as opposed to Jiang's dark, smelly, feline-filled squalor), epitomizes everything wrong with Western bourgeois city folk. Somehow, this point is supposed to be driven home by numerous scenes involving their electric juicer (!).
There's also a lot of time spent on Xiaochun's relationship with an upstairs neighbor named Lili (Chen Hong, Kaige's real-life wife), who is either a greedy golddigger or a high-end call girl (it's tough to tell, on account of Together's PG rating). Xiaochun becomes Lili's confidante-slash-whipping boy. Yet while the film goes out of its way to portray Xiaochun as a girl-crazy teenager with raging hormones, it does little to capitalize on what could have been a very interesting relationship.
The biggest downfall, aside from the whole unoriginal idea of the simple country yokels teaching the fancy city dwellers a lesson or two about life, is the performance from Tang Yun. This is the first time he's acted, so it's a little unfair to ask him to carry the picture on his narrow shoulders. Tang, a violin virtuoso, is nearly as bland as the two leads in Hulk, but does come alive in the scenes which depict him sawing away at his instrument. Hey, that sounds dirty...
1:56 - PG for mild language and thematic elements
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