The Last Emperor

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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.

1 Plot
2 Awards
3 Analysis
4 DVD
5 Trivia
6 Cast
7 External link

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Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

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.

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Awards

The film won every Academy Award for which it was nominated (9). Along with Best Picture it won Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Music, Original Score, Best Sound and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.

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Analysis

Image:Last emperor.jpg The film shows Bertolucci's mastery of fascism as an image while containing no hint of approval of the ideology. Most telling is the scene in which Pu-Yi's wife, deliberately addicted to opium by the Japanese, walks unsteadily in the palace from one Japanese guard to another, calmly gathers her strength, and spits in Puyi's face. This gesture demostrates clearly that PuYi was blinded to the fact that he was nothing more than an instrument to serve the motives of others not even capable of mustering the courage to protect his spouse.

In Bertolucci's style the film is also a family romance. There's a neat shift, early on, from a childish dream of omnipotence to the sibling's challenge "you're not the Emperor!" When Second Wife leaves the stifling court in exile in the rain, she says to the servant, who offers the umbrella with which well-bred Chinese women even today greet rain or shine, "I do not need it!", which expresses how a Modernist sense of personal responsibility and liberation may have arrived in China.

The access allowed the filmmakers by the Chinese Government may be understood as a collective statement by the leadership that while they were willing to change, and unlike traditional Communists recognize a place for the "bourgeois" individual psyche, they also felt, as a group, that the Mandate of Heaven had passed in clear succession to them.

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DVD

The DVD is padded out with more footage from the stifling palace of Manchukuo showing how Puyi was blind, at first, to the way in which he was a puppet. In particular, a character appears in the DVD that did not in the movies, and the drug-addled opium pusher appointed Minister of Defense by the Japanese, who becomes a sort of demon when he surfaces in Puyi's prison camp, whispering the awful truth to Puyi at night. In addition, the extra footage shows more detail about the way in which Puyi was unable to take care of his own needs without servants, including a scene in which the exasperated camp commander instructs the Emperor how to urinate into a bucket at night without waking his fellow prisoners.

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Trivia

Pu Yi's younger brother, Pu Chieh, and Li Wenda, who helped Pu Yi write his autobiography, were brought in to act as advisors on the film.

19,000 extras were needed over the course of the film.

The Buddhist lamas who appear in the film could not be touched by women, so extra male wardrobe helpers were hired to dress them.

Bernardo Bertolucci proposed the film to the Chinese government as one of two possible projects - the other was "La Condition Humaine" by André Malraux. The Chinese preferred this project, and made no restrictions on the content.

This is the first MPAA-rated PG-13 film to win the Academy Award for "Best Picture" (not counting subsequent films that have since been re-rated).

Jeremy Thomas managed to raise the $25 million budget for his independent production single-handedly.

This was the first western film made in and about the country to be produced with full Chinese government cooperation since 1949.

During filming of the immense coronation scene in the Forbidden City, Queen Elizabeth II was in Beijing on a state visit. The production was given priority over her by the Chinese authorities and she was therefore unable to visit the Forbidden City.