The Last Emperor

The Last Emperor
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Bernardo Bertolucci
Screenplay by	Mark Peploe Bernardo Bertolucci
Based on	From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Puyi by Puyi
Produced by	Jeremy Thomas
Starring	John Lone Joan Chen Peter O'Toole Ying Ruocheng Victor Wong Dennis Dun Ryuichi Sakamoto
Cinematography	Vittorio Storaro
Edited by	Gabriella Cristiani
Music by	Ryuichi Sakamoto David Byrne Cong Su
Production companies	Hemdale Film Corporation Recorded Picture Company
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date	4 October 1987 (1987-10-04) (Tokyo) 23 October 1987 (1987-10-23) (Italy) 26 February 1988 (1988-02-26) (United Kingdom)
Running time	163 minutes[1]
Countries	United Kingdom Italy China
Languages	English Mandarin Japanese
Budget	$23.8 million[2]
Box office	$44 million[3]

The Last Emperor (Italian: L'ultimo imperatore; Chinese: 末代皇帝) is a 1987 epic biographical drama film, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, about the life of Puyi, the last Emperor of China, whose 1964 autobiography was the basis for the screenplay written by Bertolucci and Mark Peploe. Independently produced by Jeremy Thomas, it was directed by Bertolucci and released in 1987 by Columbia Pictures.^[4] Puyi's life is depicted from his ascent to the throne as a small boy to his imprisonment and political rehabilitation by the Communist Party of China.

The film stars John Lone as Puyi, with Joan Chen, Peter O'Toole, Ruocheng Ying, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Maggie Han, Ric Young, Vivian Wu, and Chen Kaige. It was the first Western feature film authorized by the People's Republic of China to film in the Forbidden City in Beijing.^[2] At the 60th Academy Awards it won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Plot[]

By 1950, Puyi has been kept in custody for five years, since the Red Army captured him during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria at the end of World War II. In the recently established People's Republic of China, Puyi arrives as a political prisoner and war criminal at the Fushun Prison. Soon after his arrival, Puyi attempts suicide, but is quickly rescued and told he must stand trial.

42 years earlier, in 1908, a toddler Puyi is summoned to the Forbidden City by the dying Empress Dowager Cixi. After telling him that the previous emperor had died earlier that day, Cixi tells Puyi that he is to be the next emperor. After his coronation, Puyi, frightened by his new surroundings, repeatedly expresses his wish to go home, but is denied. Despite having scores of palace eunuchs and maids to wait on him, his only real friend is his wet nurse, Ar Mo.

As he grows up, his upbringing is confined entirely to the imperial palace and is prohibited from leaving. One day, he is visited by his younger brother, Pujie, who tells him he is no longer Emperor and that China has become a republic; that same day, Ar Mo is forced to leave. In 1919, the kindly Reginald Johnston is appointed as Puyi's tutor and gives him a Western-style education, and Puyi becomes increasingly desirous to leave the Forbidden City. Johnston, wary of the courtiers' expensive lifestyle, convinces Puyi that the best way of achieving this is through marriage; Puyi subsequently weds Wanrong, with Wenxiu as a secondary consort.

Puyi then sets about reforming the Forbidden City, including expelling the thieving palace eunuchs. However, in 1924, he himself is expelled from the palace and exiled to Tientsin following the Beijing Coup. He leads a decadent life as a playboy and Anglophile, and sides with Japan after the Mukden Incident. During this time, Wenxiu divorces him, but Wanrong remains and eventually succumbs to opium addiction. In 1934, the Japanese crown him "Emperor" of their puppet state of Manchukuo, though his supposed political supremacy is undermined at every turn. Wanrong gives birth to a child, but the baby is murdered at birth by the Japanese and proclaimed stillborn. He remains the nominal ruler of the region until his capture by the Red Army.

Under the Communist re-education program for political prisoners, Puyi is coerced by his interrogators to formally renounce his forced collaboration with the Japanese invaders during the Second Sino-Japanese War. After heated discussions with Jin Yuan, the warden of the Fushun Prison, and watching a film detailing the wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, Puyi eventually recants and is considered rehabilitated by the government; he is subsequently released in 1959.

Several years later in 1967, Puyi has become a simple gardener who lives a peasant proletarian existence following the rise of Mao Zedong's cult of personality and the Cultural Revolution. On his way home from work, he happens upon a Red Guard parade, celebrating the rejection of landlordism by the communists. He sees Jin Yuan, now one of the political prisoners punished as an anti-revolutionary in the parade, forced to wear a dunce cap and a sandwich board bearing punitive slogans.

Puyi later visits the Forbidden City where he meets an assertive young boy wearing the red scarf of the Pioneer Movement. The boy orders Puyi to step away from the throne, but Puyi proves that he was indeed the Son of Heaven before approaching the throne. Behind it, Puyi finds a 60-year-old pet cricket that he was given by palace official Chen Baochen on his coronation day and gives it to the child. Amazed by the gift, the boy turns to talk to Puyi, but finds that he has disappeared.

In 1987, a tour guide leads a group through the palace. Stopping in front of the throne, the guide sums up Puyi's life in a few, brief sentences, before concluding that he died in 1967.

Cast[]

Production[]

Development[]

Bernardo Bertolucci proposed the film to the Chinese government as one of two possible projects – the other was an adaptation of La Condition humaine (Man's Fate) by André Malraux. The Chinese preferred The Last Emperor. Producer Jeremy Thomas managed to raise the $25 million budget for his ambitious independent production single-handedly.^[5] At one stage, he scoured the phone book for potential financiers.^[6] Bertolucci was given complete freedom by the authorities to shoot in The Forbidden City, which had never before been opened up for use in a Western film. For the first ninety minutes of the film, Bertolucci and Storaro made full use of its visual splendour.^[5]

Tony Leung Ka-fai was originally asked to play the titular role but turned the offer due to previous commitments. The role eventually went to John Lone.^[7]

Filming[]

19,000 extras were needed over the course of the film. The People's Liberation Army was drafted in to accommodate.^[8]

In a 2010 interview with Bilge Ebiri for Vulture.com, Bertolucci recounted the shooting of the Cultural Revolution scene:

Before shooting the parade scene, I put together four or five young directors whom I had met, [including] Chen Kaige — who also plays a part in the film, he’s the captain of the guard — and Zhang Yimou. I asked them about the Cultural Revolution. And suddenly it was like I was watching a psychodrama: They started to act out and cry, it was extraordinary. I think there is a relationship between these scenes in The Last Emperor and in 1900. But many things changed between those two films, for me and for the world.^[9]

Soundtrack[]

While not included on the album soundtrack, the following music was played in the film: "Am I Blue?" (1929), "Auld Lang Syne" (uncredited), and "China Boy" (1922) (uncredited). The Northeastern Cradle Song was sung by Ar Mo twice in the film.

Release[]

Hemdale Film Corporation acquired all North American distribution rights to the film on behalf of producer Thomas,^[10] who raised a large sum of the budget himself. Hemdale, in turn, licensed theatrical rights to Columbia Pictures, who were initially reluctant to release it, and only after shooting was completed did the head of Columbia agree to distribute The Last Emperor in North America.^[2] Hemdale licensed its video rights to Nelson Entertainment, which released the film on VHS and Laserdisc.^[10] The film also received a Laserdisc release in Australia in 1992, through Columbia Tri-Star Video. Years later, Artisan Entertainment acquired the rights to the film and released both the theatrical and extended versions on home video. In February 2008 The Criterion Collection (under license from now-rights-holder Thomas) released a four disc Director-Approved edition, again containing both theatrical and extended versions.^[11] Criterion released a Blu-ray version on 6 January 2009.^[11]

The Last Emperor had an unusual run in theatres. It did not enter the weekend box office top 10 until its twelfth week in which the film reached #7 after increasing its gross by 168% from the previous week and more than tripling its theatre count (this was the weekend before it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture). Following that week, the film lingered around the top 10 for 8 weeks before peaking at #4 in its 22nd week (the weekend after winning the Oscar) (increasing its weekend gross by 306% and nearly doubling its theatre count from 460 to 877) and spending 6 more weeks in the weekend box office top 10.^[12] Were it not for this late push, The Last Emperor would have joined The English Patient, Amadeus, and The Hurt Locker as the only Best Picture winners to not enter the weekend box office top 5 since these numbers were first recorded in 1982.

The film was converted into 3D and shown in the Cannes Classics section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.^[13]

Critical response[]

The film received critical acclaim. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an 89% "Certified Fresh" score based on 72 reviews, with an average rating of 8.04/10. The site's consensus states: "While decidedly imperfect, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic is still a feast for the eyes."^[14] Metacritic reports a 76 out of 100 rating based on 15 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[15]

Roger Ebert was notably enthusiastic in his praise of the film, awarding it four stars out of four; he wrote that "Bertolucci is able to make Pu Yi's imprisonment seem all the more ironic because this entire film was shot on location inside the People's Republic of China, and he was even given permission to film inside the Forbidden City — a vast, medieval complex covering some 250 acres and containing 9,999 rooms (only heaven, the Chinese believed, had 10,000 rooms). It probably is unforgivably bourgeois to admire a film because of its locations, but in the case of "The Last Emperor" the narrative cannot be separated from the awesome presence of the Forbidden City, and from Bertolucci's astonishing use of locations, authentic costumes and thousands of extras to create the everyday reality of this strange little boy."^[16] Jonathan Rosenbaum, comparing The Last Emperor favourably to Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, claimed that "[a]t best, apart from a few snapshots, Empire of the Sun teaches us something about the inside of one director's brain. The Last Emperor incidentally and secondarily does that too; but it also teaches us something about the lives of a billion people with whom we share this planet—and better yet, makes us want to learn still more about them."^[17]

Accolades[]

Historical omissions[]

In Japan, the Shochiku Fuji Company edited out a thirty-second sequence from The Last Emperor depicting the Rape of Nanjing before distributing it to Japanese theatres, without Bertolucci's consent. Bertolucci was furious at Shochiku Fuji's interference with his film, calling it "revolting". The company quickly restored the scene, blaming "confusion and misunderstanding" for the edit while opining that the Rape sequence was "too sensational" for Japanese audiences.^[35]

Jeremy Thomas recalled the approval process for the screenplay with the Chinese government: "It was less difficult than working with the studio system. They made script notes and made references to change some of the names, then the stamp went on and the door opened and we came."^[8]

The British historian Alex von Tunzelmann wrote that the movie considerably downplays and misrepresents the emperor’s cruelty, especially during his youth.^[36] As stated by Tunzelmann and Behr (author of the 1987 book The Last Emperor), Puyi engaged in sadistic abuse of palace servants and subordinates during his initial reign well in excess of what Bertolucci’s movie portrays, frequently having eunuchs beaten for mild transgressions or no reason at all; in a demonstrative example, the young emperor once conspired to force a eunuch to eat a cake full of iron filings simply to see the eunuch’s reaction, which he was talked out of by his beloved wet nurse with some difficulty.^[37][36] Tunzelmann states that most people worldwide who have heard of Puyi are likely to have an incorrect understanding of this aspect of the emperor’s reign, as the movie is much more popular globally than more accurate biographies.^[36]

Alternate versions[]

The film's theatrical release ran 160 minutes. Deemed too long to show in a single three-hour block on television but too short to spread out over two nights, an extended version was created which runs 218 minutes. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and director Bernardo Bertolucci have confirmed that this extended version was indeed created as a television miniseries and does not represent a "director's cut".^[38]

The Criterion Collection 2008 version of four DVDs adds commentary by Ian Buruma, composer David Byrne, and the Director's interview with Jeremy Isaacs (ASIN: B000ZM1MIW, ISBN 978-1-60465-014-3). It includes a booklet featuring an essay by David Thomson, interviews with production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and actor Ying Ruocheng, a reminiscence by Bertolucci, and an essay and production-diary extracts from Fabien S. Gerard.

See also[]

• Big Shot's Funeral, a film with a plot that involves a fictional remake of The Last Emperor
• List of historical drama films set in Asia

References[]

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Last Emperor (film).

• The Last Emperor at IMDb
• The Last Emperor at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Last Emperor at Metacritic
• "The Last Emperor, or The Manchurian Candidate"—An essay by David Thomson at the Criterion Collection