Impressive But Unbalanced

Rating: 6/10 (22 July 2003)

'The Last Emperor' is a mutli-genre film that combines historical drama, political storytelling, visual sensuality and prison narrative, all parts of the fragmented life of Pu Yi, last emperor of the now eclipsed Ching dynasty. The marriage of Bernardo Bertolucci's persistent direction and Vittorio Storaro's lyrical cinematography produce a spectacular visual context, created exclusively on-location. With reverence and respect, the two Italian masters offer Western audiences precious glimpses of life and culture in one of the world's most complex civilizations. The didactic theme of the film is equally precious, delivered through the life of an 'emperor of nothing', whose elevated social position causes his life to be meaningless and interned. Paradoxically, his prison reeducation under the communist regime frees him physically and mentally by rendering him, for the first time of his life, master of his own actions. Sadly, the film's visual and moralizing components appear to exhaust the film's usefulness. The script tends to spiral around itself producing several meaningless segments, and one gets the impression that, more often than not, Bertolucci treats his actors as rudimentary, consuming himself with visual delivery and theoretical extrapolations to the expense of character development. Ultimately, more equilibrium between the film's elements would probably have achieved a higher degree of purpose, whose absence undermines this fine production in more ways than one.