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In 1987, Bernardo Bertolucci directed The Last Emperor, a movie about the life of Puyi, sometimes spelled as Pu Yi, who was the last emperor of China before it became a republic in 1911. The film was notable for having obtained permission from the Chinese government to film inside the Forbidden City, the storied site of the Imperial Palace. And possibly starting there, the movie began its clash with history, not so much by altering historical outcomes in the life of Puyi, but by leaving out information that might make the viewer less empathetic to those outcomes. Was this because Bertolucci was trying to placate the Chinese government and make sure he retained their permission to film? Possibly. Judging by how much of the real history is left in, though, it’s more likely that Bertolucci was trying to make a film about a child put into an impossible situation and leaving out disturbing facts that might make the audience a little less inclined to feel sorry for the small boy. For instance…
As a child ruler, Puyi developed some sadistic habits, most of them concerned with torturing the eunichs, the slaves who essentially ran the Forbidden City and tended to the emperor’s every beck and call. One of his favorite activities, that he himself admitted to in his own biography, was having eunichs beaten and whipped, and not occasionally but daily. That’s right, daily. When he was older, and living in the Japanese state of Manchukuo, he did the beating and whipping himself, and even managed to whip one servant until he died. And then there are his actions after he learned of his wife’s affair with one of his aides. He learned of it because she was pregnant and since he hadn’t had sex with her in years (possibly ever, according to some accounts) he was confident he wasn’t the father. As a result, after she gave birth to a baby girl, he had the newborn thrown into a boiler. These events, needless to say, are not in the movie. The first was left out, the second hadn’t come to light yet. Either way, watching The Last Emperor today, one is likely to walk away from the viewing with a skewed look at Puyi but a fairly interesting and visually captivating look at China’s cultural history during the 20th century.
The movie is told in flashback as we follow Puyi’s (played as an adult by John Lone) captivity in a reeducation camp under the new communist regime in China circa 1950. He has been declared an enemy of the state and, for once in a totalitarian state that pretty much accuses anyone it disagrees with of being an enemy of the state, they are partly right. After all, Puyi became a puppet of Japan at possibly the worst time in history given the events occurring in both countries. A large part of his reeducation and rehabilitation being deemed successful resulted from his denunciation of the Japanese and their brutal slaughter during the Rape of Nanking.
In the camp, Puyi proves absolutely useless. He has been waited on so completely that even the simplest tasks are beyond him. (The real life Puyi literally had never brushed his own teeth before his time in the camp.) He has to be told to urinate against the top rim of a bucket, instead of directly into it, so it will not make as much noise while others are sleeping. And he must confess to all he has done by recounting his life story. During this process, he becomes a fully rehabilitated citizen of the new Communist China and lives out his life as a simple gardener.
When we peak into his past, we see how he came to this point. We see the boy made emperor, the young man engaged to a girl he’s never met and finally the playboy living off the finances of the Japanese. We see his tutor, Reginald Johnston (Peter O’Toole), teaching him the ways of the modern world. And we see his gradual and complete disconnect from Chinese culture. What we don’t see is anything particularly challenging, either from a historical point of view or cinematically, and that surprised me watching it again recently for this piece.
I first viewed The Last Emperor in 1987 upon its release. I was living in Washington, D.C. and saw it at the Uptown Cinema, one of the last remaining movie palaces in the country with a massive curved wide screen. I remember being dutifully impressed and when it won a slew of Oscars, including Best Picture, I wasn’t surprised. And then I moved on and never saw it again until a couple of weeks ago. What a difference 30 years makes in your perception of things.
The first thing that struck me was that everyone spoke English. At one time, this was commonplace. Any movie made in Britain or America that took place in a foreign land was presented in English. But gradually, this shifted. Even television shows now regularly employ the local language of wherever the scene is taking place. There have been plenty of episodes of The Americans (2013-2017) that have more Russian spoken than English. I’d gotten so used to this that in my memory, The Last Emperor was in Chinese with subtitles until Johnston shows up. But that’s not the case and that’s neither good nor bad. It just made the movie feel old fashioned in a way I hadn’t remembered.
Then there’s the casting of Puyi at different ages. Richard Vuu, Tsou Tijger and Tao Wu, all play the younger versions of the emperor until adulthood when John Lone takes over. They all look and sound quite different from each other and have varying levels of acting skills. Vuu and Lone are the best but on the whole, the character himself isn’t very interesting so there’s not much anyone can do to begin with.
Then there’s the Forbidden City itself. The filmmakers gained access to film there and film multiple scenes in the outer courtyard near the gate. It’s a large, grand space but also an antique one, looking worn and neglected, as well as desolate. This large empty space may have been used well as a commentary on Puyi’s isolated and largely empty existence but seems to have attracted Bertolucci only in its scale. He finds as many ways as he can to get the camera back to it as often as possible, including Puyi and his younger brother making the eunuchs chase them into it. So much time is spent on the youthful but uninteresting life of the young emperor inside the Forbidden City that John Lone has the challenge of reengaging the audience once Puyi becomes an adult. And he does, to a degree.
Finally, there’s the thoroughly unnecessary and awkward final moment of the movie. Prior to this moment, we see the elderly Puyi, now a private citizen, visit the Imperial Palace he once lived in, but this time as a tourist. Inside, he steals away from the tour group to go to the throne. Once there, a young and dutiful Maoist boy tells him he cannot sit on the throne because it is off limits. He tells the boy that he was once the emperor and proves it by pulling out a little container from behind the throne that he kept as a boy. It contained his pet grasshopper. The young boy takes it and when he turns around Puyi is gone. Then the grasshopper emerges. It’s Bertolucci’s attempt at a poetic ending with a dash of magical realism and that’s fine, if in fact the movie ends there. But for reasons unknown, we then get a 30 second shot of a tour guide in 1987 telling her tour group that Puyi died in 1967. The end. I’m absolutely positive we could have done without that. It is clearly and obviously inferred in the previous scene that his encounter with the boy in 1967 was his farewell.
And all of this is to say that The Last Emperor, a movie I thought to be a modern biographical movie when I saw it in 1987, really is as old-fashioned as any classic studio historical picture starring Norma Shearer or Fredric March. With the exception of some language and nudity, you could easily imagine this very same movie being made in the 1930s, only with Paul Muni and Luise Rainer in the leads since actual Chinese actors wouldn’t have been allowed to play the central figures at the time. We can be thankful at least that that had changed by 1987 but little else had.
At the time, it seemed remarkable that a western movie production had gained full access to the Forbidden City and the help of the Chinese government to boot. Watching the movie again, it doesn’t seem all that remarkable anymore. Bernardo Bertolucci made a visually beautiful movie (thanks to the great work of photographer Vittorio Storaro) that was somehow sympathetic to both the Chinese communists and the last emperor himself. The Last Emperor isn’t the movie you watch for a challenging and daring look into another culture or historical figure. It’s the movie you watch to see what an old-fashioned biopic from 1937 would have looked like if it had been made in 1987. And in a strange and curiously wonderful way, that connects the story and its subject to the past better than the story itself.
Greg Ferrara
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