The Last Emperor

Bernardo Bertolucci offered the Chinese government two projects: Malraux’s La Condition humaine, or the life of Puyi. They chose Puyi. The Forbidden City had never been opened to a Western production; the first 90 minutes and the ending were shot there, and the People’s Liberation Army was drafted in for its 19,000 extras. Before the Cultural Revolution parade Bertolucci gathered young Chinese directors he knew, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou among them, and had them describe the period. Chen Kaige also plays the Captain of the Imperial Guard; Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the three composers, appears as Masahiko Amakasu. At the 60th Academy Awards it won all 9 categories it was nominated in, with no acting nomination. Only Gigi in 1958 had done that before. The extended 218 minute version is not a director’s cut; Storaro and Bertolucci say they assembled it for television as a miniseries. In Japan, Shochiku Fuji cut 30 seconds from the Nanjing sequence without permission; Bertolucci objected and it was restored. A good fit if you want to watch the Forbidden City itself as a performer. Not for anyone taking the film as a record: Puyi’s testimony to his interrogators was in fact given at the Tokyo Trials, and the historian Alex von Tunzelmann writes that it softens the young emperor’s cruelty.