Red Violins

Film culture has gotten so inhumane that Chinese director Chen Kaige needed a different metaphor to demonstrate what really matters in art. Not turning his back on cinema, Chen’s new movie Together concentrates on music as the direct expression of feeling. It turns out he made the finest new movie so far this year.

Chen trusts that people might be more willing to accept a serious proposition about music now that film appreciation has been reduced to the matrix of generic plots and special effects. His story, about a father, Liu (Liu Peiqi), who takes his violin prodigy son to Beijing hoping to find a teacher who can fulfill the boy’s potential, insists that art have a humane purpose. The father-son relationship has less to do with career than turning the boy’s talent into a virtue. (Liu is asked, "Do you want fame and fortune or consummate musicianship?") The formal, outward development of 13-year-old Xiaochun’s (Tang Yun) gift depends upon his learning affection, sensitivity, gratitude. That’s the soulfulness you can hear in music but rarely sense in movies anymore, and it wells up throughout Together.

Together’s story is so simple it amounts to a fable, but Chen tells it with exciting—and exacting—technique. Each phase of Liu and Xiaochun’s city adventure happens in swift, stylized segments; Liu comes upon an idiosyncratic teacher and Xiaochun meets a girl who stirs his adolescent, quasi-sexual affection. Their actions are vividly portrayed, but the expected exposition is abbreviated. There’s always more to the characters and situations than is immediately revealed. This sharpens the narrative and keeps the story leaping ahead in breathless jolts. Chen is practicing a cinematic equivalent to what musicians call pizzicato, which builds pulse, detail and suspense toward a release of emotion near the film’s climax.

Because the power of this kind of storytelling is cumulative, Together might strike some as corny manipulation; they’re unaccustomed to films in which the ongoing assessment of information ensures a lasting emotional effect. Yet every sequence proves Chen’s modernist sophistication. When juxtaposing Xiaochun dusting off his teacher’s sheet music against Liu earning money as a bike messenger, Chen constructs the sequence through the harmonizing colors and tones of Kim Hyung-koo’s cinematography and Zhou Ying’s editing rhythms. Above all, the entire montage is fused by music.

Together accepts Western classical tradition, but composer Zhao Lin helps Chen alternate the Western canon with updated Chinese folk sounds—the latter usually accompanying moments of personal interaction. One teacher tells Xiaochun, "Feel the music in your heart," which is not a platitude but is key to Chen’s belief that music comes from the soul. He doesn’t take it lightly, but loudly. Together creates a pact between us and the music—aurally heightening our response to classical chords the way Godard has done (Nouvelle Vague, In Praise of Love) when philosophical queries are overlaid with abrupt instrumental epiphanies.

Music being the art form with the shortest route from the soul, Chen makes it Together’s abstract narrator. At a certain point, every action becomes momentous when scored to Puccini, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky or (with faint Asian treatment) the Gershwins’ "It Ain’t Necessarily So." (Not even the art-validation of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist was this affecting.) Chen uses music vibrantly, even iconographically. The credit sequence’s fragmented views of a violin are radiant: the wood burnished, the curves outlined through sculptural lighting. It imparts a numinous aspect to everything else.

Thus, Chen depicts life as a series of casually significant events: connections/departures, expectations/resentments, tragedies/pleasantries—and grace notes. As the bohemian professor Jiang, Weng Zhiwen reveals a cool, private whimsy in his reclusive life while Chen Hong as Lili, the flashy call girl who infatuates Xiaochun, suggests one of Bertolucci’s irresistibly modern, impulsive jeune filles. Chen himself plays the impresario who conducts Xiaochun to his first international competition and deeper self-awareness. Each one idiosyncratic, they all suggest a world of crisscrossed, harmonized experiences but without the tendentiousness about social coincidence that dulled Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (the middlebrows’ Short Cuts).

For all his artiness, Chen also masters the common touch. Together may concern musical elites, but it’s wise about class as a social fact always to be fought and transcended. Chen does this through rigorous, agile craft.

When Liu, a country bumpkin with a big heart, takes a new job to pay for Xiaochun’s lessons, the construction-work montage comes right out of a 50s Hollywood epic. It’s a bracing homage to the cinema of unembarrassed melodrama—when movie emotion crested on music. Forget the cynical—and inept—ironies of Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven or the facetious pastiche of Down with Love; Chen is after a richer sensation. Liu recalls such sacrificing parents as Mildred Pierce and Stella Dallas, but Chen tells his story without mythologizing self-pity; Liu’s tenacity recalls an intractable Ozu parent. His hard sense is contrasted with youthful naivete when Xiaochun, accepting a gratuity his father refused, is falsely commended, "At least you know how life works."

Together intuits a cosmic sense of how life works; it joins the soulfulness of music to the soulfulness of sincere filmmaking. Take the moment Xiaochun looks into the eyes of those people who built his bridge to the larger world: He feels more than his small body can contain—and then plays violin with breathtaking fervor. At this point all Chen’s intercutting and narrative leap-forwards give way to a startling emotional amplitude. As the cast comes together, forming Xiaochun’s audience, an elated viewer may feel like that war veteran in Jean Renoir’s The River when asked who it is he cares about. He responded, "I care about everybody." His answer was a life lesson, and that same beneficence sweeps over you in Together.

Together Directed by Chen Kaige

Humanist filmmakers like Chen risk being derided. "Smart" folks who would scoff at Together’s sentiments have a new movie just for them: The Sundance-acclaimed documentary Capturing the Friedmans shows how the cynicism in our film culture has also led to the degradation of documentary into a mocking, insensitive genre. Sadism and prurience take the place of honest inquiry in Friedmans just like Cinemania and the unaccountably apolitical A Mighty Wind (a fiction which Friedmans most resembles).

Director Andrew Jarecki deliberately confuses issues to induce shock and smirky distance regarding the Long Island family devastated by charges of pedophilia in the 1980s. Although both a father and son were convicted, Friedmans is an entertainment for audiences who expect the worst of people—and of cinema. Jarecki trendily vacillates between ridicule and pathos. The Friedmans are shown as provincial, All-American lunkheads—whiny Mom even thinks her husband’s stash of kiddie porn is for "meditation."

Furthermore, the ultimate dysfunctional clan’s mutual abuses are even recorded on home-video, which the filmmakers treat as found treasure rather than rigorously investigating the court case.

Were Dad and son guilty? Did police entrap them? Is the eldest, most defensive son a lunatic? (A cop calls him "the clown," though he is in fact a children’s birthday party performer.) Are the glib-to-maudlin "victim" interviews a put-on? Is James Taylor’s "Carolina in My Mind" on the soundtrack to cheapen pathos or tease family solipsism? (Jarecki himself wrote the theme song to tv’s Felicity.) These basic questions are neglected to favor derisive eavesdropping. What results is an abuse of the documentary format, an offense to the basic reason we go to the movies: to learn about human experience.

My only hesitation about calling Together the year’s best movie is that it may be too beautiful to succeed in our cynical market. Jarecki should study Chen’s climactic scene to understand how an artist’s technique shows more than facile simultaneity but can evoke a spiritual affinity between people and events. Chen suggests that what inspires artists also moves people to their best, most selfless behavior, but this optimistic belief has vanished from the way most movies are now made and understood. Friedmans is less serious than Together because despite the controversial subject, it lacks the inquiring perception of behavior that justifies Chen’s magnificent sentiments. Chen’s fable expresses the emotional life of a post-revolutionary society attempting to find its meaning through individual relations and art. But this doc on family collapse merely exemplifies social and artistic collapse. The choice is yours: exploitation or exaltation.

Capturing the Friedmans Directed by Andrew Jarecki