Pu Yi is played by four different actors, as his character ages from precocious child to an adult. His life becomes less sheltered when a tutor arrives from Scotland (the eternally bemused Peter O'Toole). He takes two wives (Joan Chen and Wu Jun Mei); the marriages eventually fail. Civil war in China forces him from the Forbidden City, and he lives as a sophisticated wastrel under Japanese protection. He is installed as a puppet emperor in Manchuria with the Japanese military pulling the strings. After World War II, he is held prisoner first by the Russians, then by the Communist Chinese. There, his spirit is broken, then rebuilt. He adjusts to a new, calmer life as a gardener. He is freed, and in a great irony, is finally able to revisit the Forbidden City, this time as a tourist.
How others will see it. "The Last Emperor" won nine Academy Awards in 1988, sweeping every major non-acting category. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Score, Best Art Decoration (sets), Best Costumes, Best Sound, Best Editing. It was a great triumph for Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, previously best known for the notorious Marlon Brando feature Last Tango in Paris. Bertolucci also co-wrote the script.
Today at imdb.com, the movie has a respectable 102K user votes, and a high user rating of 7.7 out of 10. There is no significant demographic spread among the user ratings. A preponderance of user ratings are positive, especially praising the sets, costumes, and cinematography. But there is an undercurrent that believes, as I do, that the film is boring: "Rather dull and boring," "even cheap documentaries aren't this boring," "I became bored and restless," "I found myself just plain bored," "What can I say? It was BORING," "the movie was BORRRRRing."
How I felt about it. Inevitably, The Last Emperor has inaccuracies and important omissions. These serve to make Pu Yi's character more sympathetic, and to abbreviate the story. The Scottish tutor was really more of a British agent. Pu Yi's rooftop suicide attempt never happened. He never slit his wrists either. Pu Yi might never have consummated any of his marriages, and may have been gay. Pu Yi had additional marriages, to Tan Yuling, Li Yugin, and Li Shuxian, all under pressure from his political handlers. Pu Yi did more than gardening in his later life, again serving as a figurehead in governmental public appearances.
The Last Emperor was the first film granted access to the Forbidden City. Perhaps this explains the politics of the film, which favor the Chinese communists. Their enemies are vilified, from the corrupt Republic and 'Nationalist' warlords to the Japanese, who said to perform biological experiments on the Chinese people. Pu Yi's ten long years of humiliating brainwashing and imprisonment by the Chinese are depicted as being for his own good.
Only the excesses of the 1960s Cultural Revolution are criticized. There is no hint of this Wikipedia sentence regarding Mao Zedong that his "government was responsible for vast numbers of deaths with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims through starvation, persecution, prison labor, and mass executions." This figure is on the scale of unjust deaths associated with Mao's authoritarian contemporaries, Hitler and Stalin.
The biggest problem, though, with The Last Emperor is that it is boring. A huge cast, grand settings, an engrossing historical character, a handsome production, and a parade of beautiful Chinese women cannot rescue this film from tedium. The lead, John Lone, is dullest of them all. The film does perk up a bit when Peter O'Toole is around, but with a running time of 163 minutes, it remains a tough sit.