Together and The Wooden Man's Bride.
Qingjun, Li
Together (He Ni Zai Yi Qi) is a touching, emotional modern-day Chinese movie directed by the very celebrated Chinese director Chen Kaige. It was produced in 2002. The plot of the story is not complicated, yet the film is visually appealing and it creates in the viewer a striking attachment to the major characters of son, father, Professor Jiang and Professor Yu.
Xiaochun, a thirteen-year-old violin prodigy, lives with his father in a small town in China. He was brought up by his bachelor and peasant father, who works as a cook in order to provide for his family. Their life is thrifty, but the father, Liu Chen, takes great pride in his son, who started to learn violin at the age of three. The father's whole heart and aspiration is devoted to Xiaochun, whom he expects to make great achievements as a violinist. We learn that Xiaochun has been accepted to go to Beijing to take part in an important violin competition. The news, like the spring breeze in April, brings joyfulness and excitement to the father, and stirs a great deal of excitement in the small town. Collecting all the money he has accumulated, even if it is only a modest amount, Liu Chen takes Xiaochun to Beijing, leaving behind their hometown.
When the competition result is publicized, Xiaochun is ranked fifth. But Liu Cheng overhears Prof. Jiang say that Xiaochun played the best, although the prizes went to those who were from the wealthy families. Liu Cheng pleads with Prof. Jiang to take Xiaochun as his student, and persuaded by Liu Cheng's sincerity and insistence, Professor Jiang agrees. In disposition and temperament, Prof. Jiang is idiosyncratic, cynical and reclusive. But in pursuit of the noble realm of music, he is a great and awesome tutor. The advice he gives Xiaochun is thought-provoking and impressive. He remarks, "First you have to work hard. Second you must enjoy playing. Third you should not play only when you think of your mother, but play for the sake of the music." He emphasizes to Xiaochun as the key point of playing, "Feel the music in your heart." As Xiaochun's first professional violin instructor in Bejing, Prof. Jiang sets the right guideline for Xiaochun.
In order to make Xiaochun become a successful violinist star at home and abroad, Liu Cheng decides to switch Xiaochun's studies to Professor Yu, who seems more prominent, only accepts gifted students and often takes them into the fame of the spotlight. Professor Yu's arrogantly declines to teach the boy at first, but when Liu Cheng tells him the striking life story of Xiaochun's life, Yu's heart melts. Not only does he agree to instruct him, but also he insists that Xiaochun stay in his luxurious house and enjoy the middle class life. Yu's teaching is rigid and demanding. He says, "Every note is in place, but it is of no use. There is no feeling when you play. Music devoid of feeling is like an empty gun. Without bullets, how can you hit a target or conquer a listener? Feeling can't be taught. Technique, yes. But feelings are up to you." Later, he directs Xiaochun's playing by stating, "Your violin is a weapon. Your feelings are bullets. You must conquer. You must conquer through the music."
Instructed and inspired by Prof. Yu, Xiaochun makes dramatic progress. In the end, he is chosen to participate in the prestigious violin contest by virtue of having defeated a talented girl competitor who also lives in Prof. Yu's home. But when he learns that his father is going back to his home village on the night of his performance, he gives up the precious opportunity leading to glamour and acclaim without any reservation and dashes to the railway station to be "together with his father." This togetherness infuses in him more promise, more passion, more feeling and more inspiration than ever before, and this new power is evident in his playing.
One of the major themes of Together is to illustrate the simplicity, the good nature, the noble mind, and true love of a peasant father in China. Liu Chen has never married in his life, and Xiaochun is not his genetic son, a secret we learn in a most startling fashion. In fact, he rescued Xiaochun when he was deserted by his parents at the railway station as a small child. He shoulders the responsibility of a son by being a custodian. He does not have a steady job and a good salary. But he has one simple, persistent goal in life, that is, to bring up Xiaochun and provide him with good education so that Xiaochun will become a successful violinist, thereby helping him live up to the expectation of Xiaochun's real parents who left a violin beside the baby in the station. Life is not easy for this man who comes from a small town. Before being able to afford to rent a house in Beijing, he has to stay in a bathing place with Xiaochun. But no matter how difficult life is, he never abandons his goal, or his belief in his son. Throughout the film, the father is characterized as an industrious, self-giving and devoted man. It represents to some degree what it means to be a parent in Chinese culture: the success of child is the greatest joy and satisfaction of a parent. For a child's future, parents will make any sacrifice and endure any hardship.
Directed by Chen Kaige, who also produced the celebrated films such as Yellow Earth, Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon, and The Emperor and The Assassin. Together has also gathered many of the most popular actors and actresses in China. The father is played by Liu Peiqi, who is well known to Chinese audiences for his exquisite performing proficiency. Professor Jiang is played by Wang Zhiwen, and Chen Kaige, the director himself, and his wife Chen Hong respectively play the role of Professor Yu and the modern fashionable pretty woman Lili. Xiaochun is played by a virtuoso violinist. The real subtlety of the performance of these actors and actresses is seen in the quality and elegance with which they reveal many layers of contemporary Chinese interpersonal interactions.
In stark contrast, The Wooden Man "s Bride (Yan Shen or Wu Kui) is a movie that illustrates profoundly the miserable and pathetic life and fate of a woman in old China. Set in the 1920's northwestern rural China, the movie unveils an endless, spacious and sparsely-populated western desert where a wedding procession is making its difficult way. The bride, Young Mistress, who is dressed in the complete red adornment required by Chinese custom and convention, is being escorted to the groom's home by a few young peasants headed by Wu Kui. She is from a poor peasant family and her father has decided to marry her off because he owes money to the groom's family, which seems well-off enough because they run a Tofu mill. While the bridal group is taking a rest, suddenly a group of bandits, known as the Whirlwind Gang, show up and kidnap the bride and take her to their chief's headquarters. The groom, hearing the news that his bride has been stolen, acts impulsively, and prepares to seek revenge. When he goes to take his gun from its hiding place, it discharges accidentally and kills him.
Meanwhile, Wu Kui bravely walks to the gang chief's headquarters. The chief, deeply impressed by Wu Kui's honesty, sincerity and great courage, agrees to set the bride free. Wu Kui successfully delivers the bride to the groom's home, but instead of finding the happy life of marriage awaiting her, the bride is exposed to a very tragic predicament. She learns that her groom has died from the gunshot. But alas, she is not able to control her own life and fate. She has to abide by the manipulation of the groom's mother Madame Liu, who symbolizes the feudal ideology and rigid Confucian morality of pre-Liberation China. The bride is first subjected to a humiliating test of her virginity designed to prove to Madame Liu that she was not violated by the bandits. Then, shockingly, she is forced to marry her "husband" by pledging herself to a statue carved out of wood standing for her deceased groom. Ironically, the bride's wedding ceremony and her groom's funeral rituals occur at the same time. The hopelessness and the lack of any power of self-determination for women of this period are both graphically depicted.
It is understandable and reasonable that a young woman can not endure the suffering of living only with a speechless, emotionless "wooden husband" every day. Gradually, the bride becomes rebellious and disobedient, which brings conflict between her and her mother-in-law. She questions Madame Liu, "Why do you treat me like this? I don't want this dead wooden husband." But the reply is, "Disobey? No!" She aspires for freedom and wants to jump out of this feudal cage. But it is very hard for a woman to go against the deep-rooted social forces that define her life. When she runs away and goes back to her own home, her father tells her, "Listen, you are bound to marriage ... Women married are just like water poured out. It's your fate. Please accept it." She is sent back to her wooden husband by her father who represents the voice of the patriarchal society. He even apologizes to Madame Liu saying, "She is the woman of Liu family either dead or alive. I will send her back no matter how many times she runs away." In this action we see the strictness of the old Chinese saying: "Stay with a cock if you happen to marry a cock, with a dog if you marry a dog. Carry it home even if you are married to a piece of wood."
Even though she is fated to her wooden husband, her heart cannot be encaged. She is a woman, a human being with emotions and affections. Gradually, she falls in love with Wu Kui, who is a worker at the Tofu mill owned by the Liu family. He witnesses her sorrows and miseries and comes to love her dearly. Their romance brings great happiness to them, but this freedom to choose whom one will love can not take root in feudal society. Their romantic love is discovered and brought to a premature end. Wu Kui is banished out of Jigong Village. The bride's ankles are smashed as a harsh penalty, and she is chained inside the Liu's family house. The complexity of the story is shown even more dramatically in Madame Liu's feelings of shame over the affair. She is indignant and angry because she has practiced widow chastity since her husband's death twenty years earlier. She wonders why Young Mistress can not be faithful to her dead husband. We see that Madame Liu is also a victim who has been sacrificed to feudal ideology, but she never awakened to her plight, instead she followed the norm and felt satisfied and proud of her inner suffering. The ending of this movie is filled with spiritual satisfaction and rebellion. Wu Kui becomes chief of the outlaws and storms Jigong Village to save Young Mistress. He forces Madame Liu, the representative of patriarchal system, to commit suicide, and leaves with his bride.
This movie can be used as a teaching source because it offers an unrelenting picture of women's miserable situation in feudal China. Women were oppressed and suppressed both physically and spiritually in those days. They were the victims of Confucian ethical codes manifested in the "Three Obeys" (San Cong)--obey father, obey husband and obey son (after death of a husband). The complicated and ambiguous ways in which even the women themselves became a part of this system are skillfully portrayed.
The Director of this movie, Huang Jianxin, is a member of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers who also did Yellow Earth, which was set as well in northwestern China.
Li Qingjun
