For all its limitations, an absorbing study of a paradoxical history

Rating: Null/10 (5 May 2000)

A resplendent and often illuminating historical pageant that's also resolutely undramatic and, until the final (somewhat rushed) segment, astonishingly apolitical considering its subject matter and its director's career. Its subject is broader than politics, perhaps: the shape of history, personal and public, and how those two shapes interact.

Pu Yi, played by three actors and followed over six decades, is an emblem of historical change, a fulcrum between tradition and modernity (as well as between east and west) who always contrives to be ill-suited to his imperial role and perhaps his citizen's role too, until the moment when that role has definitively become mere history, vanished into museum culture. Pu Yi's radical lack of an identity may be a dramatic liability, but it's a central and necessary preoccupation for the film; its more serious weaknesses lie in the screenplay's tendency towards banality at the verbal level, and some decidedly mixed performances in the supporting cast. The principals are pretty much beyond reproach in what was never going to be an actors' film, and both Peter O'Toole and (in particular) Joan Chen find some substance in roles that are quite superficially written. Only the surfaces of things and people are accessible here, and the emperor himself is a man who is nothing but surface. He has no hidden depths, only hidden shallows.
Perhaps the energy that really drives this film is the tension between its lush cinematography and its broadly left-wing sympathies. Storaro's photography is lavish and celebratory; it adores material luxury of whatever kind - traditional Chinese or 1920s faux-Parisian or whatever - without reservation. Bertolucci's camerawork meanwhile is austere, as restrained as the performances, and the emotional and intellectual temperatures are much cooler than the colour scheme. Not surprisingly, given China's official approval of the project, it is largely anodyne in its account of the People's Republic, but the closing segment is sufficiently barbed. The snapshot of the continuing revolution, with its Maoist quasi-imperial cult, presents a country that has not changed at all, whilst the final glimpse of contemporary Beijing presents a country that has changed everything, surrendered to the westernisation which Pu Yi championed (the very existence of Forbidden City footage is testament to this). China emerges as a country in which revolution and stasis are twins, and in the present century everything and nothing has changed.