Dramatic fairy-tale

Rating: Null/10 (24 January 2002)

I've seen this movie so many times and it was the first DVD I bought right after I purchased my DVD-player.
Fortunately this movie wasn't made by Americans. They could never realize, nor understand this level of cinematography and would turn it into a Pearl Harbor (Oh my!).
What makes this movie great, is the way the movie continuously shows what seems to be a fairy-tale, but what is in fact nothing more but a play. A play played in China, suffering extraordinary changes itself. As Pu Yi mentions himself: a theatre without an audience. Left long ago.
This movie focuses on a single man, trying to make a change, but fails, for he is nothing but a puppet, controlled by the Japanese, as he for years was a puppet for China. He is eager to be in control, simply in order to make those changes reality, makes him an easy target for the Japanese. He grows up to be served and to be seen as the almighty and cannot hold himself up in New China, where there is no place for an emperor any longer.
The only persons that seems to do well in this new environment, is the woman who had in fact even less freedom; Pu yi's second wife. She claims her freedom after being settled in England.
Because The Last Emperor focuses on Pu Yi and his relatives, while moving the political issues to the background, makes this movie so 'uneasy' to look at. There is this wonderful story of a little lad who grows up in an ancient surrounding, but there is always the noise from beyond the walls he doesn't understand. He cannot understand why everything from beyond those walls (his brother paying him a visit now and then, Johnson, his tutor) seems to move on. Within those walls, time seems to stand still and everybody near him appears so eager to keep the 'real' world outside the walls of the Forbidden City.
The music makes this movie complete. A movie without good music is half wasted. It matches perfectly with the emotions, time and location. Surely Bertolucci's best movie.