The film “The Last Emperor” is a 160 minutes movie produced in 1987 by Jeremy Thomas and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. From the film, Pu Yi was a young boy of three years when he first ascended the Dragon Throne as the ruler of Chinese empire, and seven years of age when he gave up power as the emperor.
He had hardly attained the age of reasoning as considered by the Westerners, when occurrences ahead of his power had influenced his life without end. Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie “The Last Emperor” narrates the story of Pu Yi, in an imposing or impressive manner that uses the characteristic state of a young man as a mirror that reveals China’s transition from feudal system through revolution to its present identity predicament.
This is a weird and wonderful heroic narrative because it is about an exclusively submissive personality. We are familiar with long narrative about men distinguished by outstanding bravery and dignity who acts on their social order (like Gandhi), but Pu Yi was delivered into a world that permitted him no willingness to embark on daring new ventures.
The paradoxical tale was that he was emperor over not any thing, for there was no authority to go with his rule, and during the film he is regarded as the instrument of an end and victim, influenced, used to greatest advantage for the purposes of others, appreciated for what he wasn’t rather than for what he was.
The film exposes his impotence almost immediately; series of his early days in the Forbidden City are intercut with narratives from when he was presented a bike and eagerly wheel it about in the Forbidden City (showing that he is emperor who could not leave his house or attend to other activities like other boys in the country do), and later in his life, when the Chinese socialist who advocates communism had overthrown, and he was detained and restrained in a reeducation site, where a party representative spent time talking him through a private transformation from emperor to nurseryman -which was Pu Yi’s last, and possibly happiest, job.
Bertolucci production made Pu Yi’s incarceration appear all the more paradoxical because the whole movie was filmed on site inside China, and he was also afforded the chance to shot within the Forbidden City- a vast middle aged building on 250 acres with 9,999 rooms.
It is perhaps unjustifiable to value a movie for its production, but for “The Last Emperor”, the story cannot be alienated from the overwhelming charisma of the Forbidden City, and from Bertolucci’s amazing use of scenes, genuine outfits, and many extras to form the daily certainty of Pu YI.
There is a vista at the beginning of the movie when Pu Yi, sat on the Dragon Throne, attended by his subjects, and he jumped anxiously from his position and ran in the direction of the door of the room, where initially a huge billowing curtain blocked the vision.
Then the drape is moved sideways, to reveal an unbelievable scene of several emperor’s followers, all of them customarily dressed castrates, aligned in statistical accuracy to the extent that can be perceive, and all of them flattering to the Pu Yi.
Following his official handing over of power in 1912, Pu Yi retained the throne, as an instrument for the ease of the true emperors of China. In 1924, Pu Yi was forced to leave the Forbidden City, with his followers back to his place of origin Manchuria, (which was then governed by the Japanese). In a vista of great paradox, Bertolucci depicts Pu Yi in English clothes, and way of life and singing in a soft low tone “Am I Blue?”
While World War II drew nearer, Pu Yi gradually became more unconnected, but was saved by the Japanese, who placed him temporarily as their pawn in Manchuria.
His wife became a drug addict started flirting with a female Japanese homosexual. Bearing this in mind, Pu Yi embarked on a life of dissoluteness and wandering, at the time when he was overthrown by the communists and was arrested by the by Russians who gave him up to their followers.
The communist were expected to sentence Pu Yi to death, but instead he was sent to school for training.
At the end of the movie, Pu Yi was seen working as a nurseryman in Peking, and looks happy, and was believe that for him, in any case, reeducation was an achievement because it was basically education that initially directed his life towards becoming an important person.
The movie ended with an unexpected episode, ahead of the last part, in which grown Pu Yi visited the Forbidden City, which is now a tourist attraction center. He tiptoed past the velvet-textured cord and mounts onto the Dragon Throne.
Previously, it would have been regarded as a deadly crime. On the Dragon Throne, Pu Yi experienced a whole mixture of feelings. It is a motivated ending for the movie, which by no means took the wrong action of expressing one thing as regards the life of Pu Yi who personified all the challenges and irony of China in the century from 1901 to 2000.
Pu Yi’s life is a heartbreaking paradox, but it is specifically because so little “happens” in the blockbuster that its immeasurable and exclusive production program is important.
The historical and sociological relationship in “The Last Emperor” is the terrible nature of the activity and the unprecedented historical sensation of the film which makes this magnificent production classy and autonomous in the history of films.
A sociological symbol of the dealings between China and the West in mid-eighties focuses on the relationship between history and sociology in “The Last Emperor” and puts forward another heroic of a century that appears to function as a pivot, swinged by historical, political and social transformations.
Historically, there is no country like feudal China, under enemy control as it was by the sect of the ancestors, where custom gets the value of religious conviction. The fact is that on the day little Pu Yi ascended the Throne of the Dragon; he also took over some millennia of continuous history.
Victim to the rapaciousness of the Western nations, the only way of avoiding failure was to work at the altitude of the social “practicalities” of the vast edifice. This was the logic of the Chinese revolutions of between the year 1911 and 1949. From this angle, it will be observed that the imprisonment of Pu Yi is an exemplary illustration of the state of affairs in terms of a distinct life.