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The Last Emperor revisited
One of the things I got for Christmas but only got to watch now is The Last Emperor (special edition DVD, with the theatrical release, the director's cut and some documentary material). Which, despite loving it and seeing it repeatedly in the cinema, I somehow had not had in my possession before. Like Gladiator a decade later, this was one of those films critics predicted would bring back the historical epic, and which somehow failed to do so. But that's where the things the movies have in common end. If we're talking epics, Bertolucci's take on the last Emperor of China has more in common with David Lean's films and their tortured, neurotic main characters - or maybe with any given film by Orson Welles - than with Scott's good versus evil vengeance tale.
Usually if people call the main character of a story an "anti-hero" they mean someone like Firefly's Mal Reynolds, Star Wars' Han Solo, or Blake's 7's Avon - characters who only aren't heroes if you define "hero" as following the Sir Galahad model but who otherwise are actually following a very predictable heroic pattern - they're good in a fight, they do come through despite all the talk of "me first" and "I'm only in for the money", they're stubborn and display loyalty for a select few (okay, reallly select in Avon's case, but still). Pu Yi in The Last Emperor is an anti-hero in a very different sense, because he fits none of these criteria. As The Last Emperor isn't just an epic but an entry in the tricky genre of the biographical movie, Bertolucci faced the additional challenge of the conventions that usually make many entries in this genre so leaden - great man has humble beginnings, early success, set back, doubts, crisis, new success, is reaffirmed, succeeds, accomplishments, the end. Plus a lot of name checks. Having a character whose life even with the biggest rewriting twists couldn't follow this pattern helps avoiding all those traps. From the moment on three-years-old Pu Yi is, as one reviewer at the time expressed it, kidnapped into royalty (well, his father was a prince, so technically speaking that should be imperiality) taken from his home and selected as the next Emperor by the dying Empress Dowager, he's someone with all the power except the quintessential one of making his own decisions about his own life, and the few times he actually has the opportunity to make a choice, he usually makes a wrong one.
It's a poor little rich boy tale, alright, but Bertolucci never lets it drift into sentimentality. The child Pu Yi is told he can do anything he wants... but be with his family, or leave his golden cage, and the result is a character who is anything but Little Lord Fountleroy. Spoilt and deprived at the same time. One of those scenes that sum up the child Pu Yi, which contains a repeated motif of the film, the closing of a door, is Pu Yi, after being told about the death of his mother, trying to leave the Forbidden City. He gets as far as the last gate, which is invariably closed, and the men kneeling in front of him tremble because he has the power to have them executed - but not to order them to open the gate. His pet mouse, which we saw him stroke and treasure a couple of scenes earlier, emerges from his clothes, and Pu Yi looks at it. You expect him to do what sad children do and pet the thing again. Instead, he takes it and with a vicious force throws it against the locked gate. It's a rare outburst of temper in a passive character and true to the ugliness of grief and frustration in a way that counteracts easy audience sympathy.
This is one of the most visually beautiful films you'll ever see, with the predominently red and gold colours of the Forbidden City set against the stark white, grey and black of the Communist prison that provides the "present" (i.e. 1950s) day sections, and the silvery sepia tones of Tientsin and Manchuria/Manchukuo in the 1920s and 1930s. Bertolucci was the first Western director permitted to film within the Forbidden City, and he makes the most of it while never going for visuals for their own sake, without storytelling purposes. When three-years-old Pu Yi runs after the yellow curtain that rises to reveal the multitudes waiting outside during his coronation, it's the first of many times we'll see Pu Yi trying to reach something elusive, and said multitudes don't come across as something glorious but empty in comparison. In a way, we keep switching between two prisons, because the Forbidden City with all its beauty is one, as surely as the post-war camp Pu Yi is getting reeducated at, and it's the narrative irony that the ugly prison is the one which in the end actually provides freedom.
This last, a central premise of the film, is probably what provided what controversy is connected with The Last Emperor, because yes, Bertolucci does claim that getting reeducated in a Communist prison is A Good Thing - for Pu Yi. Not necessarily for other people, and the epilogue makes the, to put it mildly, dark side of Communist China quite clear. I'll get to that. But Pu Yi has actually something to atone for. Not having been Emperor of China, but having served as a puppet Emperor for the Japanese in Manchuria (which is why he's interred for war crimes). Of course, one is connected to the other - had Pu Yi been able to function on his own after being expelled from the Forbidden City, he might not have taken up the Japanese offer, had he been less self-centric, he would have seen through it earlier, had he been less passive and felt any kind of connection to his subjects as people, he would not limited his own act of rebellion against the Japanese to a speech and the attempt to side with his wife, et cetera. The 1950s sequences, starting with Pu Yi's suicide attempt, are essentially a difficult rebirth process, with Pu Yi first refusing to acknowledge any kind of responsibility and then claiming responsibility for everything, which, as the governor of his prison points out, is just as wrong. "You are responsible for your own actions." No more, no less. It's the confession, penance, absolution process as you find it in the Catholic church, or in its secularized form indeed in reeducation. (Not just in Communist systems, I hasten to add. I'm living in a country that got reeducated collectively by the Western Allies post WWII on a very similar basis.) The dark, corrupted side of this process emerges in the film's epilogue, when Pu Yi, happy and content for the first time as a simple gardener, in 1967 encounters the Red Guards and suddenly spots the governor of the prison who helped him, being abused and humiliated by the young Red Guards, who shout at him "confess, confess!" and force him to kow tow in front of the picture of Mao as surely as any Imperial subject was ever forced to kow tow in front of the Emperor.
And yet, this is also where we see that contrary to what Pu Yi earlier in the film claims, people do change. When his nurse was taken, or his wife destroyed, Pu Yi suffered for it but also didn't do anything to stop it. As he says, in regards to the exploitation and deaths of Manchuoko as well, "I let it happen". In the epilogue, however, when he sees injustice in front of him, he keeps protesting against it and trying to help another being, until he's forcibly pushed away to the ground. He still can't help, but he tries, and that makes a difference.
As with all Bertolucci films, The Last Emperor is very sensual, and Bertolucci is a director who can do sensuality without going for the obvious, i.e. nudity. (The maximum nudity in the film is probably the exposed breast of Pu Yi's wet nurse, though Bertolucci manages to sneak in something unsettling there - her nursing toddler Pu Yi doesn't stop, and when ten years old Pu Yi still sucks at her breast, we're clearly in transition territory to impending puberty.) One of the sexiest scenes in the film takes place without showing us any of the people involved - it's all forms and shifting shapes under silk covers, the Emperor and his two wives engaging in a tender and increasingly passionate threesome. Something that escaped me upon first watching due to my own younger years but which I'm amused about now is an earlier scene, when the eunuchs exploring each other's faces through a cloth, then doing this to a teenage Pu Yi, which is clearly also sensual stimulation, is observed by an increasingly uncomfortable Reginald Johnson (Pu Yi's Scottish tutor) who then presents, with a firm crash, a bike for Pu Yi to ride. In other words, sports, young man, is the way to deal with those stirring hormones, not being fondled by your eunuchs.
Director's cut versus theatrical release: I'm tempted to say those addictional scenes from the director's cut don't add anyting essential, with one exception. They do flesh out relations between Pu Yi and his brother Pu Che more, and, which is the exception I'm regretful about, between Pu Yi and his servant who ends up in prison with him. Victor Wong's performance as the later is something almost entirely lost in the theatrical release. To show an example that illustrates the difference, in the theatrical release, you do get the scene where the prisoners perform tai chi, the governer comes up to Pu Yi (transferred from the cell with his brother and his servant and thus for the first time in his life without anyone attending him) and chides him for his neglected uniform and the fact he can't pee without waking up his fellow inmates, Pu Yi after the governor leaves turns around to look at his servant, the servant exclaims "you still think I am your servant, don't you?", stops the tai chi, and goes to the bank in a clear gesture of renunciation. In the theatrical release, this is where the scene ends, and it hasn't been preceeded by much. in the director's cut, you had earlier scenes with an increasingly reluctanct servant, and you had the scene where the governor asked why Pu Yi claims he was abducted by the Japanese when his servant says he had Pu Yi's trunks packed, with Pu Yi asking the servant later why he had written said and the servant, ashamed but still clearly saying "because it is the truth". More importantly, the tai chi scene doesn't end with the servant going to the bank. Pu Yi somewhat helplessly continues with his exercises. The servant jumps up again, goes to Pu Yi, crying the entire time, repeating "this is the last time, the last time" while he orders Pu Yi's clothes and binds his shoes. In a later scene, he is released, and Pu Yi realizes he hadn't even known the man was married.
As far as performances go, it's amazing how the various children and John Lone as adult Pu Yi really melt into each other so you never doubt it's the same person. (Oh, and kudos to the make-up department which manages to get Lone from adolescent to Pu Yi in his sixties without making it look fake.) Lone also manages to make that general passivity and, with the exception of a few outbursts, restrain somehow compelling. When Pu Yi, after being told by his wife that she's pregnant (by another man, as they've stopped having sex a while ago), makes his one attempt to salvage his marriage, stand by his wife and rebel against his Japanese sponsors/masters by telling the Japanese representatives that he and the Empress are expecting an heir, there is so much going on behind his eyes when he outwardly only makes two gestures; putting his hands on the shoulders of his wife and then, later, after the brutal retort "yes, we're aware of the situation, does your majesty wish to know the name of the father?" withdrawing them. And speaking of Pu Yi's wife, Joan Chen, whom I later encountered again in Twin Peaks, gives a great performance, going from teasing and cheerful young girl to the tragic figure eating orchids during the Manchuoko coronation party to the wreck of a woman arriving at the end of the war, entirely destroyed by opium.
The very last scene of the film - after the encounter between Pu Yi and the Red Guards - is something entirely magical in more than one sense, ending the movie on a note of grace. Revisiting the Forbidden City as a visitor buying a ticket, Pu Yi encounters a child (the son of a guard) in the coronation hall, and... but that would spoil what really should be watched unspoiled, if someone hasn't seen the film yet. It is one of my favourite endings for one of my favourite epics.
A superb film, and one I'll be glad to rewatch a few more times.
Usually if people call the main character of a story an "anti-hero" they mean someone like Firefly's Mal Reynolds, Star Wars' Han Solo, or Blake's 7's Avon - characters who only aren't heroes if you define "hero" as following the Sir Galahad model but who otherwise are actually following a very predictable heroic pattern - they're good in a fight, they do come through despite all the talk of "me first" and "I'm only in for the money", they're stubborn and display loyalty for a select few (okay, reallly select in Avon's case, but still). Pu Yi in The Last Emperor is an anti-hero in a very different sense, because he fits none of these criteria. As The Last Emperor isn't just an epic but an entry in the tricky genre of the biographical movie, Bertolucci faced the additional challenge of the conventions that usually make many entries in this genre so leaden - great man has humble beginnings, early success, set back, doubts, crisis, new success, is reaffirmed, succeeds, accomplishments, the end. Plus a lot of name checks. Having a character whose life even with the biggest rewriting twists couldn't follow this pattern helps avoiding all those traps. From the moment on three-years-old Pu Yi is, as one reviewer at the time expressed it, kidnapped into royalty (well, his father was a prince, so technically speaking that should be imperiality) taken from his home and selected as the next Emperor by the dying Empress Dowager, he's someone with all the power except the quintessential one of making his own decisions about his own life, and the few times he actually has the opportunity to make a choice, he usually makes a wrong one.
It's a poor little rich boy tale, alright, but Bertolucci never lets it drift into sentimentality. The child Pu Yi is told he can do anything he wants... but be with his family, or leave his golden cage, and the result is a character who is anything but Little Lord Fountleroy. Spoilt and deprived at the same time. One of those scenes that sum up the child Pu Yi, which contains a repeated motif of the film, the closing of a door, is Pu Yi, after being told about the death of his mother, trying to leave the Forbidden City. He gets as far as the last gate, which is invariably closed, and the men kneeling in front of him tremble because he has the power to have them executed - but not to order them to open the gate. His pet mouse, which we saw him stroke and treasure a couple of scenes earlier, emerges from his clothes, and Pu Yi looks at it. You expect him to do what sad children do and pet the thing again. Instead, he takes it and with a vicious force throws it against the locked gate. It's a rare outburst of temper in a passive character and true to the ugliness of grief and frustration in a way that counteracts easy audience sympathy.
This is one of the most visually beautiful films you'll ever see, with the predominently red and gold colours of the Forbidden City set against the stark white, grey and black of the Communist prison that provides the "present" (i.e. 1950s) day sections, and the silvery sepia tones of Tientsin and Manchuria/Manchukuo in the 1920s and 1930s. Bertolucci was the first Western director permitted to film within the Forbidden City, and he makes the most of it while never going for visuals for their own sake, without storytelling purposes. When three-years-old Pu Yi runs after the yellow curtain that rises to reveal the multitudes waiting outside during his coronation, it's the first of many times we'll see Pu Yi trying to reach something elusive, and said multitudes don't come across as something glorious but empty in comparison. In a way, we keep switching between two prisons, because the Forbidden City with all its beauty is one, as surely as the post-war camp Pu Yi is getting reeducated at, and it's the narrative irony that the ugly prison is the one which in the end actually provides freedom.
This last, a central premise of the film, is probably what provided what controversy is connected with The Last Emperor, because yes, Bertolucci does claim that getting reeducated in a Communist prison is A Good Thing - for Pu Yi. Not necessarily for other people, and the epilogue makes the, to put it mildly, dark side of Communist China quite clear. I'll get to that. But Pu Yi has actually something to atone for. Not having been Emperor of China, but having served as a puppet Emperor for the Japanese in Manchuria (which is why he's interred for war crimes). Of course, one is connected to the other - had Pu Yi been able to function on his own after being expelled from the Forbidden City, he might not have taken up the Japanese offer, had he been less self-centric, he would have seen through it earlier, had he been less passive and felt any kind of connection to his subjects as people, he would not limited his own act of rebellion against the Japanese to a speech and the attempt to side with his wife, et cetera. The 1950s sequences, starting with Pu Yi's suicide attempt, are essentially a difficult rebirth process, with Pu Yi first refusing to acknowledge any kind of responsibility and then claiming responsibility for everything, which, as the governor of his prison points out, is just as wrong. "You are responsible for your own actions." No more, no less. It's the confession, penance, absolution process as you find it in the Catholic church, or in its secularized form indeed in reeducation. (Not just in Communist systems, I hasten to add. I'm living in a country that got reeducated collectively by the Western Allies post WWII on a very similar basis.) The dark, corrupted side of this process emerges in the film's epilogue, when Pu Yi, happy and content for the first time as a simple gardener, in 1967 encounters the Red Guards and suddenly spots the governor of the prison who helped him, being abused and humiliated by the young Red Guards, who shout at him "confess, confess!" and force him to kow tow in front of the picture of Mao as surely as any Imperial subject was ever forced to kow tow in front of the Emperor.
And yet, this is also where we see that contrary to what Pu Yi earlier in the film claims, people do change. When his nurse was taken, or his wife destroyed, Pu Yi suffered for it but also didn't do anything to stop it. As he says, in regards to the exploitation and deaths of Manchuoko as well, "I let it happen". In the epilogue, however, when he sees injustice in front of him, he keeps protesting against it and trying to help another being, until he's forcibly pushed away to the ground. He still can't help, but he tries, and that makes a difference.
As with all Bertolucci films, The Last Emperor is very sensual, and Bertolucci is a director who can do sensuality without going for the obvious, i.e. nudity. (The maximum nudity in the film is probably the exposed breast of Pu Yi's wet nurse, though Bertolucci manages to sneak in something unsettling there - her nursing toddler Pu Yi doesn't stop, and when ten years old Pu Yi still sucks at her breast, we're clearly in transition territory to impending puberty.) One of the sexiest scenes in the film takes place without showing us any of the people involved - it's all forms and shifting shapes under silk covers, the Emperor and his two wives engaging in a tender and increasingly passionate threesome. Something that escaped me upon first watching due to my own younger years but which I'm amused about now is an earlier scene, when the eunuchs exploring each other's faces through a cloth, then doing this to a teenage Pu Yi, which is clearly also sensual stimulation, is observed by an increasingly uncomfortable Reginald Johnson (Pu Yi's Scottish tutor) who then presents, with a firm crash, a bike for Pu Yi to ride. In other words, sports, young man, is the way to deal with those stirring hormones, not being fondled by your eunuchs.
Director's cut versus theatrical release: I'm tempted to say those addictional scenes from the director's cut don't add anyting essential, with one exception. They do flesh out relations between Pu Yi and his brother Pu Che more, and, which is the exception I'm regretful about, between Pu Yi and his servant who ends up in prison with him. Victor Wong's performance as the later is something almost entirely lost in the theatrical release. To show an example that illustrates the difference, in the theatrical release, you do get the scene where the prisoners perform tai chi, the governer comes up to Pu Yi (transferred from the cell with his brother and his servant and thus for the first time in his life without anyone attending him) and chides him for his neglected uniform and the fact he can't pee without waking up his fellow inmates, Pu Yi after the governor leaves turns around to look at his servant, the servant exclaims "you still think I am your servant, don't you?", stops the tai chi, and goes to the bank in a clear gesture of renunciation. In the theatrical release, this is where the scene ends, and it hasn't been preceeded by much. in the director's cut, you had earlier scenes with an increasingly reluctanct servant, and you had the scene where the governor asked why Pu Yi claims he was abducted by the Japanese when his servant says he had Pu Yi's trunks packed, with Pu Yi asking the servant later why he had written said and the servant, ashamed but still clearly saying "because it is the truth". More importantly, the tai chi scene doesn't end with the servant going to the bank. Pu Yi somewhat helplessly continues with his exercises. The servant jumps up again, goes to Pu Yi, crying the entire time, repeating "this is the last time, the last time" while he orders Pu Yi's clothes and binds his shoes. In a later scene, he is released, and Pu Yi realizes he hadn't even known the man was married.
As far as performances go, it's amazing how the various children and John Lone as adult Pu Yi really melt into each other so you never doubt it's the same person. (Oh, and kudos to the make-up department which manages to get Lone from adolescent to Pu Yi in his sixties without making it look fake.) Lone also manages to make that general passivity and, with the exception of a few outbursts, restrain somehow compelling. When Pu Yi, after being told by his wife that she's pregnant (by another man, as they've stopped having sex a while ago), makes his one attempt to salvage his marriage, stand by his wife and rebel against his Japanese sponsors/masters by telling the Japanese representatives that he and the Empress are expecting an heir, there is so much going on behind his eyes when he outwardly only makes two gestures; putting his hands on the shoulders of his wife and then, later, after the brutal retort "yes, we're aware of the situation, does your majesty wish to know the name of the father?" withdrawing them. And speaking of Pu Yi's wife, Joan Chen, whom I later encountered again in Twin Peaks, gives a great performance, going from teasing and cheerful young girl to the tragic figure eating orchids during the Manchuoko coronation party to the wreck of a woman arriving at the end of the war, entirely destroyed by opium.
The very last scene of the film - after the encounter between Pu Yi and the Red Guards - is something entirely magical in more than one sense, ending the movie on a note of grace. Revisiting the Forbidden City as a visitor buying a ticket, Pu Yi encounters a child (the son of a guard) in the coronation hall, and... but that would spoil what really should be watched unspoiled, if someone hasn't seen the film yet. It is one of my favourite endings for one of my favourite epics.
A superb film, and one I'll be glad to rewatch a few more times.
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