THE LAST EMPEROR
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Impressive biographical historical epic gives an emotionally uninvolving account of the life of Pu Yi, the last emperor of China. Bertolucci tells us about historical events he should show us and shows us sex scenes he should probably only tell us about. But the sweep of history is certainly present and a great deal of change in China is obvious. Rating: +2.
We in the United States feel we have grown used to change. Change seems to come quickly and to virtually all aspects of life. But in fact change does not come very fast to the United States and we do not take to change well. The country that has seen the most change this century is, in all probability, China. For millennia it had retained a feudal structure under the emperors. China held firmly to its past as the rest of the world moved forward. When it finally did let go of that past, it snapped violently forward into the 20th Century. In the span of a single lifetime it has gone from dynasties to the electronic age. Even a shorter lifetime could have seen five very different forms of government. And such a lifetime was the one lived by Pu Yi, the last emperor of China.
THE LAST EMPEROR chronicles Pu Yi's life from the days the emperor ruled to the Republic, to the days when the Japanese invaded and ruled Manchuria, to the Communist revolutionary government, and finally to the Cultural Revolution. And each government uses Pu Yi without ever giving him any power. He is always a puppet and each succeeding government merely seizes the strings from the previous one. Each regime is portrayed in a bad light and each resurrects aspects of the days when the emperor ruled.
THE LAST EMPEROR is a big film, an epic, with a great deal of historical scope. As such it is quite a good film, but it is in some ways very flawed. Bernardo Bertolucci somehow fails to breathe any life at all into his characters. They are strangely uninvolving; one is always displaced from them. The characters are more ciphers than humans. Just when we might be ready to empathize with Pu Yi, he does something immature and nasty and suddenly we find ourselves not caring for him again. THE LAST EMPEROR also panders a little, taking more opportunities than necessary to shock us with scenes of breast-feeding, feces-sniffing, multi-partner sex, opium use, and lesbianism. Bertolucci underestimates his audience (or at least me) if he thinks that this sort of thing is what would interest them, even if he finds historical documentation for it, which I doubt.
All told, I would rate THE LAST EMPEROR a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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