The Last Emperor

The Last Emperor is a 1987 biographical film which tells the life story of Aisin-Gioro Puyi (Henry), the last Emperor of China.

Plot

The film opens with Pu-Yi's re-entry into China as a prisoner and war criminal, Pu-Yi having been captured by the Red Army when the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War in 1945 (see Operation August Storm). Pu-Yi attempts suicide which only renders him unconscious, and in a flashback, apparently triggered as a dream, Pu-Yi relives his first entry, with his nurse, into the Forbidden City.

Related Topics:
China - Prisoner - War criminal - Red Army - Soviet Union - Pacific War - 1945 - Operation August Storm - Suicide - Forbidden City

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The theme is one of being, whether Emperor or war criminal, the objectified plaything of powerful and mysterious forces, and structurally the movie is a series of chronological flashbacks to Pu-Yi's early life (his hot-house upbringing, unexplainable events including his brother's childish challenge to his status as the Emperor, his arranged marriage and so on), and flash-forwards to his prison life, which is portrayed, probably under the influence of the Chinese government as a condition for authorizing production in China, as a sort of re-education camp and not a Gulag.

Related Topics:
Prison - Chinese government - Gulag

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But owing to the re-education including newsreels of Japanese war crimes in Manchuria and the defeat of Japan, Puyi realizes accurately his need to take responsibility for his life, and the end of the film is a flash-forward to the mid-1960s during the Mao cult and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

Related Topics:
Japanese - War crimes - Manchuria - 1960s - Mao - Cultural Revolution

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Puyi is portrayed as a gardener (where there is a dim echo of Hirohito's postwar career as a marine biologist) who lives a proletarian existence. But on his way home from work, he happens upon a very well-done rendition of a Mao parade, complete with children playing pentatonic music on accordions en masse and dancers who dance the rejection of landlordism by the masses, aroused by rectified Mao thought.

Related Topics:
Marine biologist - Pentatonic - Accordion

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His prison camp commander is one of the "dunces" punished as insufficiently revolutionary in the parade, and in a deliberately ironic scene, the last Emperor makes imperial remonstrance to the students, but is so clearly, to the students, an ordinary prole that they do not bother doing more than telling him to "fuck off" (which is Bertolucci's accurate rendition of the way in which Mandarin became significantly more crude in the Mao era).

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Puyi then visits the Forbidden City as an ordinary tourist, and meets a little boy who in red scarf and with commanding mien represents "the future" and commands him away from the throne. But Pu-Yi proves to the little boy that he was indeed the Son of Heaven and in the only unexplained, mystical scene, the little boy turns to see that the Emperor has disappeared.

Related Topics:
Tourist - Red scarf - Son of Heaven

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We are left to imagine the Emperor as having passed the Mandate of Heaven to the current leadership, and borne aloft to the Western sky. And then, as in a dream, a tourist klaxon calls Americans together in front of the throne a few years later, after China had opened to the West, and the tour guide, as in a dream, sums it all up for us, encapsulating Puyi's life in a few sentences and informing us of his date of death.

Related Topics:
Klaxon - Americans

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The film shows Bertolluci's mastery of fascism as an image while containing no hint of approval of the ideology. Most telling is the scene in which Pu-Yi's wife, deliberately addicted to opium by the Japanese, walks unsteadily in the palace from one Japanese guard to another, calmly gathering her strength, and spitting in Puyi's face. This gesture gives the urban legend (that war protestors spat on American soldiers) an entirely new look, showing that in certain circumstances, the expectorant response might be the correct one.

Related Topics:
Fascism - Ideology - Opium - Urban legend

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In Bertolluci's style the film is also a family romance. There's a neat shift, early on, from a childish dream of omnipotence to the sibling's challenge "you're not the Emperor!" When Second Wife leaves the stifling court in exile in the rain, she says to the servant, who offers the umbrella without which wellbred Chinese women even today greet rain or shine, "I do not need it!", which expresses how a Modernist sense of personal responsibility and liberation may have arrived in China.

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The access allowed the filmmakers by the Chinese Government may be understood as a collective statement by the leadership that while they were willing to change, and unlike traditional Communists recognize a place for the "bourgeois" individual psyche, they also felt, as a group, that the Mandate of Heaven had passed in clear succession to them.

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The DVD is padded out with more footage from the stifling palace of Manchukuo showing how Puyi was blind, at first, to the way in which he was a puppet. In particular, a character appears in the DVD that did not in the movies, and the drug-addled opium pusher appointed Minister of Defense by the Japanese, who becomes a sort of demon when he surfaces in Puyi's prison camp, whispering the awful truth to Puyi at night. In addition, the extra footage shows more detail about the way in which Puyi was unable to take care of his own needs without servants, including a scene in which the exasperated camp commander instructs the Emperor how to urinate into a bucket at night without waking his fellow prisoners.

Related Topics:
DVD - Manchukuo - Puppet - Minister of Defense

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