The Last Emperor movie storyline. One of the most successful films ever, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s lavish epic biography of Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty of China (the “Lord of ten thousand years and Son of Heaven”) before the Communist revolution deposed him. Based in part on Pu Yi’s autobiography, From Emperor to Citizen, Bertolucci garnered unprecedented support and permission from the Chinese government, something no other Western film company had received since 1949.
This was the first film ever to be shot in the Forbidden City in the People’s Republic of China, aside from the Lucy Jarvis documentary Forbidden City (1973). The grand, sweeping, character-driven story, told through flashbacks, follows the bittersweet life of the boy emperor born in 1906, who first sat in the Dragon Throne at the age of three — memorably depicted by the imagery of the scene in which the restless young boy leaps up and pushes away a billowing yellow drapery – and sees thousands of his loyal costumed eunuch-servants bowing before him. He was literally a puppet – imprisoned within the gilded walls of the Forbidden City, and never allowed to leave its gates.
In 1912, at the age of 7, he formally abdicated the throne, and remained a powerless figurehead Emperor, receiving tutoring from Scottish Reginald Johnston (O’Toole) in the ways of the West. In 1924 during a period of civil war, he was ousted from the Forbidden City (along with his opium-addicted empress Wan Jung (Chen) and official consort Wen Hsiu (Mei)) and moved to his native, Japanese-controlled Manchuria, where he served as a puppet emperor backed by the Japanese.
After World War II, he was held prisoner as a pro-Japanese war criminal – first by the Russians, and then by the Communist Chinese for ten years, until being freed at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution.
In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, as a dispassionate young adult (Lone), Pu Yi wears Western clothes and wistfully croons “Am I Blue” – a silent cry for salvation from his boredom and entrapment. By film’s end, his new life as a lowly gardener in Peking in the late 1960s is finally happy and free, and in a poignant scene as an elderly man, he revisits the Forbidden City, now open to tourists.
The Last Emperor (1987)
Directed by: Bernardo Bertolucci
Starring: John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O’Toole, Ruocheng Ying, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Maggie Han, Vivian Wu, Jade Go, Fumihiko Ikeda
Screenplay by: Mark Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci
Production Design by: Ferdinando Scarfiotti
Cinematography by: Vittorio Storaro
Film Editing by: Gabriella Cristiani
Costume Design by: James Acheson
Set Decoration by: Chunpu Wang
Art Direction by: Maria-Teresa Barbasso, Gianni Giovagnoni, Gianni Silvestri
Music by: David Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cong Su
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: December 18, 1987
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