Word: yi
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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...
...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...