Makes today's "Hero" look like the Hollywood fantasy it is . . .

Rating: 10/10 (26 February 2007)

It is reassuring that IMDb is international, especially in view of the "review" promulgated on the Wikipedia website by an "American" respondent, wherein, it seems to me, Yankee imperialisms of ethnocultural assumptions, presumptions, AND misapperceptions reign supreme. To me, Bertolucci's astonishing "read" and "take" on the life and times of Henry Pu-Yi is, at heart, totally "subjective" and "intimate" vis-a-vis the enormous historic backdrop of global consequence. The review I refer to, after brief scanning, seems to insist on American bias and prejudices of the day and beyond, which is to say that exotica lies well beyond their appreciation. Experiencing Bertolucci's Forbidden City and imperial "life" from a reference point of sociocultural sniffishness, not forgetting sociopolitical judgments, is, to me, ongoing "western" error. Judgments of dynastic downfall and historic human fallibility herein neglects contemporaneous American incivilities like Prohibition gangsterisms and that sad saga of Depression America and the Okies and Arkies of Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." Along the same lines, as with the India artists and craftspeople of Attenborough's superb "Gandhi," I wonder why "The Last Emperor" garnered Oscars in all categories but those of the actors therein. For me, it is racism, impure and simple. And, by the way, I wonder just how indebted the Bertolucci script was to the Chinese teleseries that preceded it by three years? In the final estimate, "The Last Emperor" must be accounted a masterwork for sure, and a film for all time, whatever the context.