Movies - The Last Emperor

Home > Listing Index > Movies > The Last Emperor

	Movies - The Last Emperor

The Last Emperor is a 1987 biographical film which tells the life story of Aisin-Gioro Puyi, the last Emperor of China.

It stars John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O'Toole, Ruocheng Ying, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Maggie Han, Ric Young, Vivian Wu, and Chen Kaige. When released theatrically the film ran 160 minutes; the extended version currently available on DVD runs 218 minutes.

The movie was written by Mark Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci, and directed by Bertolucci. It is considered a plausible portrayal of the life of Aisin-Gioro Puyi. Some characters in the movie (such as Pu-Yi's Japanese handler) were composites of actual characters, but most of the characters and the incidents correspond to actual people and events that occurred in Pu-Yi's life.

At the same time, many historians have wondered if the documents which were the basis of the film such as Pu-Yi's autobiography and his British tutor's (Reginald Johnston) description of him are accurate. In the film and in these documents, Puyi has been portrayed as a pawn of more powerful forces, but many have pointed out that had Puyi portrayed himself otherwise, he would have been executed.

This was the first feature film ever authorized by the government of the People's Republic of China to film in the Forbidden City.

Plot

The film opens in 1950 with Pu-Yi's re-entry into the just-proclaimed People's Republic of China as a prisoner and war criminal, having been captured by the Red Army when the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War in 1945 (see Operation August Storm) and put under Soviet custody for five years. Pu-Yi attempts suicide which only renders him unconscious, and in a flashback, apparently triggered as a dream, Pu-Yi relives his first entry, with his nurse, into the Forbidden City.

The theme is one of being, whether Emperor or war criminal, the objectified plaything of powerful and mysterious forces, and structurally the movie is a series of chronological flashbacks to Pu-Yi's early life (his hot-house upbringing, unexplainable events including his brother's childish challenge to his status as the Emperor, his arranged marriage and so on), and flash-forwards to his prison life, which is portrayed, probably under the influence of the Chinese government as a condition for authorizing production in China, as a sort of re-education camp and not a Gulag. Another Chinese government influence was the fact that Pu-Yi's bisexuality is removed in the film and instead given to the female spy who seduces Pu-Yi's wife with an orgy of opium and sex.

But owing to the re-education including newsreels of Japanese war crimes in Manchuria and the defeat of Japan, Puyi realizes accurately his need to take responsibility for his life, and the end of the film is a flash-forward to the mid-1960s during the Mao cult and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

Puyi is portrayed as a gardener (where there is a dim echo of Hirohito's postwar career as a marine biologist) who lives a proletarian existence. But on his way home from work, he happens upon a very well-done rendition of a Mao parade, complete with children playing pentatonic music on accordions en masse and dancers who dance the rejection of landlordism by the masses, aroused by rectified Mao thought.

His prison camp commander is one of the "dunces" punished as insufficiently revolutionary in the parade, and in a deliberately ironic scene, the last Emperor makes imperial remonstrance to the students, but is so clearly, to the students, an ordinary prole that they do not bother doing more than telling him to "fuck off" (which is Bertolucci's accurate rendition of the way in which Mandarin became significantly more crude in the Mao era).

Puyi then visits the Forbidden City as an ordinary tourist, and meets a little boy who in red scarf and with commanding mien represents "the future" and commands him away from the throne. But Pu-Yi proves to the little boy that he was indeed the Son of Heaven and in the only unexplained, mystical scene, the little boy turns to see that the Emperor has disappeared.

We are left to imagine the Emperor as having passed the Mandate of Heaven to the current leadership, and borne aloft to the Western sky. And then, as in a dream, a tourist klaxon calls Americans together in front of the throne a few years later, after China had opened to the West, and the tour guide, as in a dream, sums it all up for us, encapsulating Puyi's life in a few sentences and informing us of his date of death.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Last Emperor ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article The Last Emperor; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay