Few major directors have seen their careers drop as precipitously as Chen Kaige, whose 1993 melodrama Farewell, My Concubine–in concert with other galvanizing works by Fifth Generation filmmakers Zhang Yimou (Raise The Red Lantern) and Tian Zhaungzhuang (The Blue Kite)–put Chinese cinema front and center on the world stage. Chen's 1996 follow-up Temptress Moon was a gorgeous mess, but it sparkled with enough ambition and political purpose that it seemed more like a noble misstep than a harbinger of things to come. But it was only the beginning of what could charitably be called an identity crisis, as Chen chased his impersonal 1999 historical epic The Emperor And The Assassin with the English-language Killing Me Softly, a long-shelved Joseph Fiennes-Heather Graham erotic thriller that's only now seeing a quiet video release. Chen returned home to make Together, and the film's sentimentality whiffs of a director still finding his bearings, content with merely ushering a conventionally satisfying hankie-soaker across the finish line. Miles away from Concubine in form and function, with thinly defined characters and unreflective attitudes about urban values vs. country values, the film would be impossible to identify as Chen's if his name weren't in the opening credits. The clichés start with the four principals: a lovable Damon Runyon type dressed in mismatched rags, a prodigiously talented kid who's mature beyond his years, a hooker with a heart of gold, and a bedraggled old teacher redeemed by his charge. With all their savings stuffed in his knit cap, Liu Peiqi and his 13-year-old son Tang Yun, a gifted violinist, move from the rural provinces to Beijing, where Tang auditions for a prestigious music school. But without the bribe money to buy his son a spot over less capable students, Liu turns to the eccentric Wang Zhiwen, a retired music teacher who lives alone in a two-room heap ruled by his adopted stray cats. Wang agrees to give Tang lessons, but the boy's attention drifts in other directions, including an infatuation with a neighboring call girl (Chen Hong) and a rich professor (the director himself, in a convincing turn) with connections to fame. Together plays out predictably along class lines, with the haves revealed as manipulative and corrupt, and the have-nots as a close-knit band of scrappers who can't be priced out of their dignity. (The class politics hit bottom with a space-age juicer that takes on far more symbolic value than it should. In Chen's eyes, there's apparently nothing more bourgeois than a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.) The soundtrack's virtuoso violin solos are skillfully integrated into the story, but never have Chen's skills been so misapplied, leading to no greater end than goosing up the emotions for an inspirational finale. In the future, he'd be better off leaving that work to hacks.