The vaunted Fifth Generation of Chinese film directors — including Zhang Yimou, with his brave and brilliant films such as Raise the Red Lantern, and Chen Kaige, with his sweeping, subversive Farewell My Concubine — has taken a Disneyish turn of late. Zhang’s Happy Times (2001) and now Chen’s Together both feature adolescent characters and sentimental stories. Whether as a result of government pressure or commercial ambition or both, these world-class filmmakers have been getting a little soft lately, especially compared to such young up-and-comers as Jia Zheng-ke (Platform). Be that as it may, they offer a lot more style, substance, and humanity than such Hollywood versions of the same as What a Girl Wants or The Lizzie Maguire Movie.

Chen, for example, despite the sappy premise of Together, remains true to his recurrent theme of the artist’s function in society and history. Instead of the ravaging Japanese invaders faced in Concubine, however, the most 13-year-old Xiaochun (Tang Yun, whose performance ranges from affectless to radiantly pure spontaneity) has to contend with is his bumbling bumpkin dad, Liu Cheng (played by Liu Peiqi with the ingratiating, borderline imbecility of a Chinese Jim Varney). He has big plans for his boy’s fame and success. Xiaochun’s mother, apparently, ran off when he was an infant, leaving behind her violin and the wish that her son might someday achieve greatness.

Xiaochun would just as soon stay in their provincial village, serenading the pregnant wife of the local honcho to induce her successful labor. But dad makes him return the cash he’s given for that service, packs their bags, puts all their money into his ubiquitous red hat, and takes them to Beijing to seek their fortune.

In the city, though, success doesn’t come from hard work and talent. Xiaochun enters an audition to no avail; later, his father overhears one of the judges remark that Xiaochun was the best, too bad they were bribed to choose someone else. In response, Liu Cheng pursues Professor Jiang (Wang Zhiwen), a teacher of the old school now reduced to squalor, bitter memories, and an apartment full of cats. But dad sees in him the mentor who will uncover his son’s genius.

In the meantime, though, it seems like Xiaochun is spending most of his time picking up Professor Jiang’s dirty laundry and mediating squabbles with the unwashed curmudgeon’s landlady. Besides, he’s a little distracted by their Holly Golightly–ish neighbor Lili (Chen Hong, Chen’s real-life wife), a miserably unsuccessful gold digger hung up on a worthless man. Smitten, Xiaochun will do anything for the frivolous but faithful Lili, and she regards him as her confidant.

The fourth contender and third father figure in this struggle for the heart and violin of young Xiaochun, who more and more is beginning to resemble the soul of contemporary China (or perhaps the protagonist in an Eastern fusion of Shine and Stella Dallas) in this whimsical allegory, is Chen Kaige himself, in the guise of the Svengali-like Professor Yu. Ruthless and cynical, Yu has mastered the art of image manipulation. Fed up with the old-fashioned intuitive methods of Professor Jiang, the irrepressible Liu Cheng tracks down Professor Yu and tells him his story (Chen mysteriously cuts away before he can finish). Yu is moved, and takes the new student on.

Yu, of course needs Xiaochun as much as he needs him. He knows how to shape talent into stars, but as he himself brutally points out to one of his protégés, once stars, they no longer feel the music. But Yu still feels the music. Certainly Chen does, as his Professor Yu, teaching in a classroom lit by slanted sunbeams and shadowed by rueful nostalgia, recounts how he and his friends risked imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution in order to listen to a recording of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto (Chen himself experienced this; he also was forced to denounce his father by the Red Guard).

That piece contends throughout the film with the maddeningly bittersweet refrains of Bruch’s "Scottish Fantasy," and the two come to a crescendo in a climactic scene that resolves past and present, duty and desire, artistic ambition and the need for social conformity. No doubt a Disney version of this deceptively subtle and complex, if ultimately sentimental, fable will soon be in the works. If so, expect conformity to overshadow artistic ambition. Meanwhile, Chen’s Together is an instance of sublime filmmaking just on the brink of kitsch.