"The Last Emperor" won nine Academy Awards in 1988, sweeping every major non-acting category. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Score, Best Art Decoration (sets), Best Costumes, Best Sound, Best Editing. It was a great triumph for Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci (previously best known for "Last Tango in Paris") who also co-wrote the script.

And some of those Oscars may have been deserved. The cinematography, at least for those scenes that take place in the Forbidden City, is excellent. The sets and costumes are also very good. While the script is not so great, the basic story is compelling.

Now if only the film wasn't so boring! "The Last Emperor" isn't quite as dull as the Cage-Ryan sleeper "City of Angels". It is twice as long, however, making it deserving of one Academy Award that it did not win: The Toughest Sit. The film's ultimate failure (it was an expensive box office stiff, at least in the U.S.) is probably due to the casting, script, and direction. Something is just lacking in those areas. The acting is often wooden, particularly from John Lone, who has the leading role.

Pu Yi, who became China's last emperor, was born in 1906. At age three, he was separated from his mother, moved into the Forbidden City, and crowned emperor. The Forbidden City is a gilded cage for Pu Yi. It is a vast, walled-off estate staffed with a thousand eunuchs who keep the emperor in luxury. It is also in effect a prison, since the emperor is not allowed to leave. He is also powerless, with a series of warlords controlling his destiny.

Pu Yi is played by four different actors, as his character ages from precocious child to an adult. His life becomes less sheltered when a tutor arrives from Scotland (the eternally bemused Peter O'Toole). He takes two wives (Joan Chen and Wu Jun Mei); the marriages eventually fail. Civil war in China forces him from the Forbidden City, and he lives as a sophisticated wastrel under Japanese protection. He is installed as a puppet emperor in Manchuria with the Japanese military pulling the strings. After World War II, he is held prisoner first by the Russians, then the Communist Chinese. There, his spirit is broken, then rebuilt. He adjusts to a new, calmer life as a gardener. He is freed, and in a great irony, is finally able to revisit the Forbidden City, this time as a tourist.

An excellent short biography can be found online at www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/7545/PuYi.html. "The Last Emperor" seems to have some historical inaccuracies. These serve to make Pu Yi's character more sympathetic, and to abbreviate the story. The Scottish tutor was really more of a British agent. Pu Yi may never have consummated his marriages. Pu Yi had additional marriages, to Jade Lute and Li Shu-hsien, both under pressure from his political handlers. Pu Yi did more than gardening in his later life, again serving as a figurehead in governmental public appearances.

"The Last Emperor" was the first film granted access to the Forbidden City. Perhaps this explains the politics of the film, which favor the Chinese communists. Their enemies are vilified, from the corrupt Republic and 'Nationalist' warlords to the Japanese, who performed biological experiments on the Chinese people. Pu Yi's ten years of humiliating, brainwashing imprisonment by the Chinese are depicted as being for his own good. Only the excesses of the 1960s Cultural Revolution are criticized.

I was disappointed in "The Last Emperor", which is visually impressive but spiritually uninvolving. (41/100)



Recommended: No