After scoring a disastrous own goal in 2002 with his first English language feature Killing Me Softly, Chinese director Chen Kaige returns to home ground for this even-handed drama. It's about provincial teenager Xiaochun (Tang Yun), whose father (Liu Peiqi) takes him to Beijing to audition for one of the city's most prestigious music schools. Moving from the countryside to the urban jungle, shy Xiaochun is shocked to learn that playing the violin has as much to do with capitalism as classical music.
In Beijing, Xiaochun's country bumpkin father convinces down-at-heel professor Jiang (Wang Zhiwen) to take his son under his wing. Jiang, a heartbroken recluse who lives in a hovel surrounded by stray cats, teaches Xiaochun to play with his heart. But when Xiaochun moves on to his next teacher, Professor Yu (played by Kaige himself), things prove rather different. An urban teacher with an eye on financial success, Yu is more interested in fame and fortune than consummate musicianship. Which route should Xiaochun take?
Held together by a richly eclectic score that sets Debussy and Strauss against traditional Chinese folk music and some compositions by the director, this unashamedly sentimental film plucks the heartstrings until they're all aquiver.
"SLICK, PROFESSIONAL AND SAFE"
Undoubtedly a bold departure for Kaige - who made his name on grand historical epics such as Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon - this is slick, professional but unremittingly safe filmmaking that tick-tocks from scene to scene with the clockwork precision of a metronome.
More populist than classical, Together With You is destined to be a crowd-pleasing drama. Some audiences will surely balk at the mechanical way it manipulates the emotions, though - in the words of Professor Jiang, this is a film in which "every note is in place but there is no feeling".
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Together With You (He ni zai yi qi) (2003)
