Word: yi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Best remebered for Last Tango in Paris, Italian director Bertolucci makes a triumphant return to the screen, this time chronicling the life of China's last emperor, Pu Yi (John Lone). Starting from the emperor's ascension to the throne at the age of three, Bertolucci covers nearly 60 years of Pu Yi's life in a three-hour extravaganza...
...life of Pu Yi reads like something from "Poor Little Rich Girl." At the age of three, Pu Yi has servants, tutors, and advisers to help him rule the kingdom. Rule, however, is one thing that Pu Yi is not allowed to do. After four short years on the throne, a revolution he does not even witness from inside his palace forces Pu Yi to abdicate...
...works astonishingly well. Screenwriter Mark Peploe has used the flashback form to cover 60 years of remote, enigmatic history, and for once the device accurately reflects reality. In the '50s, as a prisoner of the victorious Chinese Communists, Pu Yi (played as an adult by John Lone, who somehow makes stunned passivity hypnotic) was indeed forced to confront his past. The length and rigor of his sentence depended largely on how his recollections conformed to Maoist history, and so the simple act of remembrance becomes inherently suspenseful. More important, a contrast and an analogy are enforced by the close juxtaposition...
...streets on his bicycle; an Emperor and his bride (the lovely, fragile Joan Chen) overwhelmed by their huge wedding chamber; the great courtyard filled with wailing eunuchs, dismissed by their ruler; a tennis court, so strangely out of place in these precincts and yet the locale where Pu Yi hears that he has been deposed -- all of this is Bertolucci at his effortless best, a man from whom unforgettable visual metaphors seem to flow of their own accord...
There are times when history fails Bertolucci, imposing on his story Pu Yi's conscious collaboration with the Japanese -- a great black hole, morally and politically obscure, that threatens to swallow up the movie. Yet the director's eye remains preternaturally alert. He almost redeems the film's long middle passage with a scene showing the Emperor crooning Am I Blue? for his courtiers in exile. And the film's concluding sequence, so clear, so inevitable, should not be spoiled by discussion. Very simply, Bertolucci has found an elegance of design and execution that few of his contemporaries could even...