Name Bernardo Bertolucci is written all over this film

Rating: 8/10 (4 February 2018)

The Last Emperor is a upsetting drama about a man who spent his whole life in a cage, being someone's puppet. He grew up in the Forbidden City, where he played the leading role in a theater without an audience. He was raised and educated to regard himself as a sublime creature, but the cage is a cage even if it is made of gold. When communists took power in China, he gets asylum from Japan, where he continues to maintain the illusion of Emperor while being a Japanese marionette. When the Russians liberate Manchuria, he ends up in prison where he finally begins to grasp the world around him as it really is.
Under the baton of Bernardo Bertolucci was born a movie which was nominated for nine Oscars and won all nine. It takes almost three hours, it's slow and not so entertaining, but the depth and strength of this drama does not leave room for boredom. This film is both technically and essentially excellent and I recommend to everyone who did not watch it to make up for that failure.
8/10
During the film, I had the impression that some parts of it were very familiar, as if I had already watched it, and I'm sure I didn't. It was only on the last scene that I discovered why, because the loan was so large that it could not go unnoticed. Korean film The Last Princess was apparently created after the model of this film. The titles of the films are almost identical, the story has a lot of similarities, and the end of The Last Princess is almost copied from The Last Emperor. The fact is that the stories of the last Korean princess and the last Chinese Emperor by their very nature must have some similarities, but the similarity of these two films is too large to be attributed to coincidence. All other similarities could be accidental, but the end is definitely rip off.