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MoviesMan comes to terms with himself on grand scale in ‘Last Emperor’By Jim EmersonThe RegisterREVIEWhen Bernardo Bertolucci’s 4-hour-and-5-minute “1900” was released 10 years ago, critic Pauline Kael wrote a review headlined “Hail, Folly!” in which she said that, despite the unwieldiness of the film, next to it, most other current movies look like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick. Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” clocks in at a comparatively modest 2 hours and 46 minutes, but it is an epic of similarly overwhelming scope and ambition.First, the vital statistics: “The Last Emperor” begins in 1950 and then flashes back to cover 59 years in the life of Pu Yi, the final ruler of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), who acceded to the Dragon Throne as the ruler of billions in 1908 at the age of 3 and who died a gardener, a re-educated citizen of the People’s Republic, in 1967. Four actors play the character along this life’s journey (at ages 3,8, 15 and adult).The production was shot over a four-month period at the Beijing Film Studios and in various authentic locations in China, including two months inside the 500-year-old, 250-acre, 9,999-room Forbidden City itself. (The Chinese believed that only heaven had 10,000 rooms.) The cast includes 60 main characters, played by actors from six nations. More than 19,000 extras were employed (1,500 as imperial eunuchs), among them many soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.These numerals, however, don’t begin to give you a sense of the scale on which “The Last Emperor” operates. Bertolucci’s film is a visionary work of staggering proportions — an ungainly amalgam of history, mythology, biography, magic, politics, spirituality that’s also a personal chronicle.Based on Pu Yi’s memoirs, “From Emperor to Citizen,” this is the story of a child who becomes “The Lord of 10,000 Years” at age 3 but who becomes a prisoner in his own palace, isolated from the people he supposedly rules. It tells of a pampered, self-possessed young man who is thrust into a rapidly changing world of which he has virtually no firsthand knowledge. It is the story of an old man who finally comes to accept who he is and learns to make peace with the child he once was. These are just a few ways of approaching “The Last Emperor.” The picture as a whole is simply too overpowering to apprehend all at once.The film’s opening section takes place in 1950 along the Russian-Chinese border, where Pu Yi (played here by John Lone) and other “war criminals” are imprisoned and forced to write their confessions. Master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who won Oscars for “Apocalypse Now” and “Reds” and whose collaborations with Bertolucci have included “The Conformist,” “Last Tango in Paris” and “1900”) photographs this portion of the film as though it were taking place at the bottom of the sea — a worldTh* film: “The Last Emperor.Stars: John Lone, Peter OToole, Joan Chen, Victor Wong, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Richard Vuu. Behind ths scams: Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Screenplay by Mark Peploe, with Bertolucci. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. Music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne and Cong Su.Playing: Starts today in Orange County. Running time: 2 hours, 46 minutes.Rated: PG-13, for nudity.leeched of color, in muted shades of gray and khaki, as though everything were coated with centuries’ worth of sediment.Here, in prison, Pu Yi undergoes a mythic rebirth. After 10 years’ incarceration, he emerges as a peaceful and productive Communist citizen. The visual drabness of this 1950 prologue (a fulcral period in Pu Yi’s life to which the film returns repeatedly) makes the sudden shift back to 1908, and the spectacular realm of the Forbidden City, all the more breathtaking.Perhaps the most indelible image from “The Last Emperor” (and the one used in the ad campaign) is that of the beautiful bald 3-year-old Pu Yi (Richard Vuu) toddling, like some mischievous Brothers Quay baby doll, out onto the stone steps of his monumental palace, where a multitude of courtiers, dressed in vibrant red and yellow robes, have assembled on the grounds to await the appearance of His Majesty. His Majesty, of course, couldn’t care less. Intitially, the boy is attracted by a billowing sunlit banner of Imperial Yellow silk, but then the sound of a single cricket captures his attention. He’s oblivious to the massive assembly. Seen from a distance, they form pretty patterns, but their sheer numbers have reduced them to an abstraction.Such magnificent passages suggest the grandeur and artifice of a Josef von Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich picture (instead of “The Scarlet Empress”: “The Yellow Emperor”), a world where politics becomes pageantry. Inside the Forbidden City, sealed off from the social turmoil of early 20th-century China, life has evolved into a never-ending succession of rigid and restrictive medieval rituals. Bertolucci and Storaro shoot the ornate trappings of the palace through Stembergian filters of latticework, lace, gauze and smoke, each layer screening out impurities (like the needs and feelings of a lonely boy) until “The Son of Heaven” has become nothing more than another glorious icon, a human objet d’art of aesthetic and historical interest only.Upon witnessing an elaborate mealtime ceremony, Pu Yi’s Scottish tutor, Reginald Johnston (the customarily splendid Peter O’Toole), asks his majesty if he has lunch like this every day. “Yes, every day,” replies Pu Yi. “I do not know why.It has always been like this.” Later, he characterizes the moribund world of theJohn Lone and Joan Chen play Emperor Pu Yi and Empress Wan Jung of China in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 'The Last Emperor,’ an epic story about the end of the Qing dynasty.Forbidden City as a theater without an audience.” Long after China itself has become a republic, with a president heading the government instead of a ruling emperor, the 3000-year-old dynastic rites habitually continue to be acted out inside the walls of the palace.As a teen-ager, Pu Yi becomes the proverbial bird in a gilded cage, a prisoner of his bloodline. The only way he can penetrate the fortress walls is to listen through them. “I want to see the city of sounds,” he cries. Eventually, he climbs to a precarious perch on the roof for a glimpse of the outside world.After Pu Yi is finally expelled from the Forbidden City, he takes up the life of a bourgeois dandy — perhaps an inevitable extension of his childhood position as the figurehead emperor of an obsolete dynasty. By this point, Pu Yi has lost any sense of his own humanity, having evolved into a purely aesthetic creation. He and his companions dance through ballrooms and bedrooms like decadent marionettes, and they demonstrate their decadence by smoking opium, strikingposes and doim: salacious things with their tongues. They’ve turned into caricatures of then-selves.Y»ars later, in prison, an impatient intern gator attempts to strip Pu Yi of his ingrained solipsism: “All your life you thought you were better than everyone else. Now you think you're the worst of all.” In “The Last Emperor,” we see a man who has everything (riches, power, adoration) reduced to a man who has nothing. But it’s only through this painful stripping-away process that he is eventually able to discover, and embrace, the core of his own identity.Like its epic predecessor, “1900,” “The Last Emperor” contains passages of awk wardness and occasional belabored scenes in which nothing much seems to be accomplished. But it’s a film of such polyphonic richness, so full of history (both personal and political) and imagery, that pieces of it continue to reverberate off one another in your memory for days after you’ve seen it, suggesting further patterns and connections to be explored.
Newspaper Details
Santa Ana Orange County Register
Santa Ana, California, US
Fri, Nov 20, 1987
Page 209
Full Page
Clipped by
Rotten T.
USA 28 Jul 2022
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