Word: yi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with its stern, sumptuous sprawl, more likely earned a decorous, distanced respect in a slim year. The other nominees for Best Picture were three comedies and one high-tech yuppie horror movie -- not the Academy's favorite genres. By contrast, Bertolucci's true-life fable of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, China's last monarch, had all the familiar Academy-epic goods. It rips turbulent drama from the back pages of a high school history book. It serves up an opulent visual sensibility amid exotic locales. And it concludes with a humanism that affirms both continuity and change for the family...
...Yi continues to live the life of an emperor without really being one, maintaining the luxuriant standards of his former lifestyle. But alas, the poor youth is lonely. Not allowed to go beyond the gates of the Forbidden City, he has to satisfy his curiosity through books and magazines...
Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro do well with the movie's scenes of debauchery and debasement. A master of capturing erotica, Bertolucci takes advantage of Pu Yi's early imperial splendor and later playboy lifestyle in Tienstin to give cinema some of the most sensual images since Bertolucci's own Tango. Bertolucci and Storaro follow the emperor and empress (Chen) as rich and powerful friends seduce them. While the emperor continues to foster megalomanic visions of regaining the throne, his wife takes to opium...
...displaced person nearly his entire life, manipulated by palace eunuchs, by the Japanese (while he is the puppet emperor of Manchuria) and finally by the Communists--Pu Yi never gets a fair chance at the throne. His life represents 60 years of Chinese political subjugation. An anti-hero at best, Lone's Pu Yi wins over the audience's sympathies. Every time there is even a glimmer of hope in his life a door literally shuts...
...beautiful Chen gives a moving performances as Pu Yi's vulnerable, opium-addicted wife. Peter O'Toole, in a cameo as Pu Yi's English tutor, is like most of the rest of the cast in that he more or less just adds to the scenery. This film really belongs to Bertolucci. Though Lone and Chen have some wonderful scenes, particularly at the end of the film, the most stunning aspect of the film is the cinematography. Bertolucci has once again proven that he is the reigning emperor of cinema spectacle...