42 years earlier, in 1908, a toddler Puyi is summoned to theForbidden City by the dyingEmpress Dowager Cixi. After telling him that theprevious emperor had died earlier that day, Cixi tells Puyi that he is to be the next emperor. After his coronation, Puyi, frightened by his new surroundings, repeatedly expresses his wish to go home, but is denied. Despite having scores of palaceeunuchs and maids to wait on him, his only real friend is hiswet nurse,Ar Mo.
As he grows up, his upbringing is confined entirely to the imperial palace and he is prohibited from leaving. One day, he is visited by his younger brother,Pujie, who tells him he is no longer Emperor and that China has become arepublic; that same day, Ar Mo is forced to leave. In 1919,Reginald Johnston is appointed as Puyi's tutor and gives him aWestern-style education, and Puyi becomes increasingly desirous to leave the Forbidden City. Johnston, wary of thecourtiers' expensive lifestyle, convinces Puyi that the best way of achieving this is through marriage; Puyi subsequently wedsWanrong, withWenxiu as a secondary consort.
Puyi then sets about reforming the Forbidden City, including expelling the palace eunuchs. However, in 1924, he himself is expelled from the palace and exiled toTientsin following theBeijing Coup. He leads a decadent life as aplayboy andAnglophile, and sides withJapan after theMukden Incident. During this time, Wenxiu divorces him, but Wanrong remains and eventually succumbs toopium addiction. In 1934, the Japanese crown him "Emperor" of theirpuppet state ofManchukuo, though his supposed political supremacy is undermined at every turn. Wanrong gives birth to an illegitimate child, but the baby ismurdered at birth by the Japanese and proclaimedstillborn. She is then taken to a clinic where her physical and mental state declines even further. Puyi remains the nominal ruler of the region until Japan's capitulation. He decides to surrender to the Americans but before he can leave, he is captured by the SovietRed Army and handed over to the Chinese.
Under the Communist re-education program for political prisoners, Puyi is coerced by his interrogators to formally renounce his forcedcollaboration with the Japanese invaders during theSecond Sino-Japanese War. After heated discussions with Jin Yuan, the warden of the Fushun Prison, and watching a film detailing thewartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, Puyi eventually recants and is considered rehabilitated by the government; he is subsequently released in 1959.
Several years later in 1967, Puyi has become a simple gardener who lives a peasantproletarian existence following the rise ofMao Zedong's cult of personality and theCultural Revolution. On his way home from work, he happens upon aRed Guard parade, celebrating the rejection oflandlordism by the communists. He sees Jin Yuan, now one of the political prisoners punished as an anti-revolutionary in the parade, forced to wear adunce cap and asandwich board bearing punitive slogans.
Puyi later visits the Forbidden City, now turned into a museum, where he meets an assertive young boy wearing the red scarf of thePioneer Movement. The boy orders Puyi to step away from the throne, but Puyi proves that he was indeed theSon of Heaven before approaching the throne. Behind it, Puyi finds a 60-year-old petcricket that he was given by palace officialChen Baochen on his coronation day and gives it to the child. Amazed by the gift, the boy turns to talk to Puyi, but finds that he has disappeared.
In 1987, a tour guide leads a group through the palace. Stopping in front of the throne, the guide sums up Puyi's life in a few, brief sentences, before concluding that he died in 1967.
Bernardo Bertolucci proposed the film to theChinese government as one of two possible projects – the other was an adaptation ofLa Condition humaine (Man's Fate) byAndré Malraux. The Chinese preferredThe Last Emperor. ProducerJeremy Thomas managed to raise the $25 million budget for his ambitious independent production single-handedly.[8] At one stage, he scoured the phone book for potential financiers.[9] Bertolucci was given complete freedom by the authorities to shoot in the Forbidden City, which had never before been opened up for use in a Western film. For the first ninety minutes of the film, Bertolucci and Storaro made full use of its visual splendour.[8]
In a 2010 interview withBilge Ebiri forVulture.com, Bertolucci recounted the shooting of the Cultural Revolution scene:
Before shooting the parade scene, I put together four or five young directors whom I had met, [including] Chen Kaige — who also plays a part in the film, he's the captain of the guard — andZhang Yimou. I asked them about theCultural Revolution. And suddenly it was like I was watching a psychodrama: they started to act out and cry, it was extraordinary. I think there is a relationship between these scenes inThe Last Emperor and in1900. But many things changed between those two films, for me and for the world.[11]
British historianAlex von Tunzelmann wrote that the movie considerably downplays and misrepresents the Emperor's cruelty, especially during his youth.[12] As stated by Tunzelmann and Behr (author of the 1987 bookThe Last Emperor), Puyi engaged in sadistic abuse of palace servants and subordinates during his initial reign well in excess of what Bertolucci's movie portrays, frequently having eunuchs beaten for mild transgressions or no reason at all; in a demonstrative example, the young Emperor once conspired to force a eunuch to eat a cake full of iron filings simply to see the eunuch's reaction, which he was talked out of by his beloved wet nurse with some difficulty.[12][13] Tunzelmann states that most people worldwide who have heard of Puyi are likely to have an incorrect understanding of this aspect of the Emperor's reign, as the movie is much more popular globally than more accurate biographies.[12]
The film contains several other historical inaccuracies: in real life, Puyi left the Forbidden City when his mother died; as he recounts in his memoirs, he did not have sex with his wives; Puyi actually stopped the Japanese from killing the Empress's lover rather than let him be murdered; although the film mentions theBeijing Coup, it erroneously claims that the president fled the capital instead of being put under house arrest; the testimonies that Puyi gives to his Chinese interrogators were in fact given at theTokyo Trials.[14][15][16]
Jeremy Thomas recalled the approval process for the screenplay with the Chinese government: "It was less difficult than working with the studio system. They made script notes and made references to change some of the names, then the stamp went on and the door opened and we came."[10]
While not included on the album soundtrack, the following music was played in the film: "Am I Blue?" (1929), "Auld Lang Syne" (uncredited), and "China Boy" (1922, uncredited). TheNortheastern Cradle Song was sung by Ar Mo twice in the film.
Hemdale Film Corporation acquired allNorth American distribution rights to the film on behalf of producer Thomas,[17] who raised a large sum of the budget himself. Hemdale, in turn, licensed theatrical rights toColumbia Pictures, who were initially reluctant to release it, and only after shooting was completed did the head of Columbia agree to distributeThe Last Emperor in North America.[4]
The Last Emperor opened in 19 theatres in Italy and grossed $265,000 in its first weekend. It expanded to 65 theatres in its second weekend and 93 in its third, increasing its weekend gross to $763,000 and grossing $2 million in its first 16 days. Six days after its Italian opening, it opened in Germany and grossed $473,000 in its first weekend from 50 theatres and $1.1 million in its first 10 days.[18] The film had an unusual run in US theatres. It did not enter the weekend box office top 10 until its twelfth week in which the film reached number 7 after increasing its gross by 168% from the previous week and more than tripling its theatre count (this was the weekend before it was nominated for theAcademy Award for Best Picture). Following that week, the film lingered around the top 10 for 8 weeks before peaking at number 4 in its 22nd week (the weekend after winning the Oscar), increasing its weekend gross by 306% and nearly doubling its theatre count from 460 to 877, and spending 6 more weeks in the weekend box office top 10.[19] Were it not for this late push,The Last Emperor would have joinedThe English Patient,Amadeus, andThe Hurt Locker as the only Best Picture winners to not enter the weekend box office top 5 since these numbers were first recorded in 1982.
OnRotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 86% based on 124 reviews, with an average rating of 8.10/10. The site's critics consensus states: "While Bernardo Bertolucci's decadent epic never quite identifies the dramatic pulse of its protagonist, stupendous visuals and John Lone's ability to make passivity riveting giveThe Last Emperor a rarified grandeur."[20]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 76 out of 100 based on 15 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[21] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale.[22]
Roger Ebert was notably enthusiastic in his praise of the film, awarding it four out of four:
"Bertolucci is able to make Pu Yi's imprisonment seem all the more ironic because this entire film was shot on location inside the People's Republic of China, and he was even given permission to film inside the Forbidden City — a vast, medieval complex covering some 250 acres (100 ha) and containing 9,999 rooms (only heaven, the Chinese believed, had 10,000 rooms). It probably is unforgivablybourgeois to admire a film because of its locations, but in the case ofThe Last Emperor the narrative cannot be separated from the awesome presence of the Forbidden City, and from Bertolucci's astonishing use of locations, authentic costumes, and thousands of extras to create the everyday reality of this strange little boy."[23]
"At best, apart from a few snapshots,Empire of the Sun teaches us something about the inside of one director's brain.The Last Emperor incidentally and secondarily does that too; but it also teaches us something about the lives of a billion people with whom we share this planet—and better yet, makes us want to learn still more about them."[24]
TheShochiku Fuji Company edited out a thirty-second sequence depicting theRape of Nanjing before distributing it to Japanese theatres. Bertolucci had not given his consent for the cut, and was furious at the interference with his film, which he called "revolting". The company quickly restored the scene, blaming "confusion and misunderstanding" for the edit while opining that the Rape sequence was "too sensational" for Japanese moviegoers.[25]
Hemdale licensed its video rights toNelson Entertainment, which released the film onVHS andLaserdisc.[17] The film also received a Laserdisc release inAustralia in 1992, through Columbia Tri-Star Video. Years later,Artisan Entertainment acquired the rights to the film and released both the theatrical and extended versions on home video. In February 2008The Criterion Collection (under license from now-rights-holder Thomas) released a four disc Director-Approved edition, again containing both theatrical and extended versions.[26] Criterion released aBlu-ray version on 6 January 2009.[26]
The film's theatrical release ran 163 minutes. Deemed too long to show in a single three-hour block on television but too short to spread out over two nights, an extended version was created which runs 218 minutes. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and director Bernardo Bertolucci have confirmed that this extended version was indeed created as atelevision miniseries and does not represent a true "director's cut".[44]
The Criterion Collection 2008 version of four DVDs adds commentary byIan Buruma, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the Director's interview withJeremy Isaacs (ISBN978-1-60465-014-3). It includes a booklet featuring an essay byDavid Thomson, interviews with production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and actor Ying Ruocheng, a reminiscence by Bertolucci, and an essay and production-diary extracts from Fabien S. Gerard.
The film was for quite some time unavailable on DVD or Blu-Ray in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, as cinematographerVittorio Storaro had insisted on a cropped 2:1 version that retroactively conforms the film to hisUnivisium standard. Copies of the film in its original ratio were then rare and sought after by fans of the film.[citation needed]
The film has since been restored in 4K and in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and has been released on Blu-ray and UHD in 2023 in several countries using this 4K restoration.[45]
