Fascinating portrait but disquieting political landscape

Rating: 9/10 (29 March 2007)

A very strange film about China. To look at the history of this country in the first seven decades of the 20th century through the exclusive eyes of the last emperor who lived locked up in the Forbidden City all his life till he was freed by the Japanese and marched to Manchuria to become the last emperor there is kind of debilitating and disappointing. Then he was captured by Mao Zedong's troops and was re-educated in some kind of rehabilitation camp and finished his life as a gardener. At the end of his life he saw the mounting pressure coming from the Red Guards and announcing the Cultural Revolution. The vision is both sorry and disappointed in a way. But does this film present a picture of this man, or of China, or of the world that is worth remembering? He is too capricious to be in anyway great or even remembered. He lost all his power when Sun Yat Sen arrived and yet he survived as some kind of a symbol that the Japanese used. He accepted to sell himself to the Japanese as this symbol precisely. But he more or less gracefully acknowledged the fact later on, though we will never know whether he agreed with the rehabilitation procedure or just suffered it and tolerated it out of surviving interest. Rather beautiful though if anything.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne