The Last Emperor, an extraordinarily handsome film to see, is singularly instructive about how a government can shape audience attitudes around the world by investing money and facilitating production of a major motion picture.
Bernardo Bertolucci's last successful film, Last Tango in Paris, dates back a good fifteen years. The Italian director has more recently been peddling projects around in the hope of finding a taker anywhere in the world. Like a number of other Western directors, he yearned to film André Malraux's celebrated novel Man's Fate, so he proposed a coproduction with the People's Republic of China.
He had also read the "autobiography" of the onetime emperor of China, From Emperor to Citizen. It took the Chinese less than a month to make a basic deal to do the emperor's story. As for Malraux's novel, they first claimed they didn't know the book, that there was no translation. Finally, according to an interview with Bertolucci in Film Comment, they admitted that the material was still too touchy. They viewed the book as a defeat of communism. Bertolucci tried to explain that all workers in the West fell in love with Chinese communism because the book gave such a romantic picture of the revolution. The Chinese smiled politely at Bertolucci and said they really thought he should make The Last Emperor.
High Profile Sought
The Chinese wanted hard currency, a prestigious director, and the high international profile such a film would give them. They also found it attractive that Bertolucci was politically correct. Indeed, in the coproduction contract for The Last Emperor, Bertolucci's name is always followed by the words, "member of the Italian Communist Party." They indulgently let the Italian director have his sex scenes: the emperor discreetly romping with the empress and the number one concubine under silken sheets.
The Cultural Revolution in which 30 million perished, however, is presented as a tiny blip on the screen of history. The fact that the former emperor, after his years of "remolding" in Mao's prisons, spent five years at the Fragrant Hills Hotel in Beijing with a skilled ghostwriter composing his autobiography is not touched on in the film. All unsuspecting Western viewers get is the image of the onetime emperor, dressed in his blue boiler suit, happy and relaxed, able to enjoy the company of his fellow men while tending his garden. The New Man remade by the wonders of communist society. No, Bertolucci does not give us the annual New Year's party to which Chou En-Lai would invite the former emperor and his family for dinner.
As for the Chinese, caught up in the spirit of The Last Emperor, they turned out a film of their own, from a woman's point of view, The Last Empress, which emphasizes the emperor's cruel mistreatment of the empress and two concubines.
Anyone remotely interested in China would be advised to see Bertolucci's film, if only for the scenes filmed in the Imperial City (known in the West as "The Forbidden City"), and for the rich panoply of Chinese imperial life. For a balanced recounting of the emperor's life, however, they would do well to read Edward Behr's The Last Emperor, published in connection with the film, which paid, however, infinitely more respect to history.
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