il Somnambulist

Rating: 2/10 (24 December 2009)

When this came out I liked it because it flattered my pretensions about being worldly. In retrospect, I can't find anything in it that made me sit through it twice. 30 minutes in, it still hasn't gotten moving. It has no forward impulse. The emperor Pu-Yi is such a passive historical figure, it's hard to care about him... or even to relate to him. It's harder still when Bertolucci is done with him. Even as Pu-Yi tries on ill-fitting personas. Even with an editorializing score, telling you where you're supposed to feel something, the movie is numbing and rambling. No amount of shouting Chinese revolutionaries can inject drama into what is hopelessly undramatic and undramatized. You'd think Bertolucci knew his task was to find a throughline for this muddle, but instead he's a muddle amplifier. He's found nothing to dramatize; or perhaps more correctly, his entire dramatizing urge is crushed by his anomie urge. For a Marxist, Bertolucci is way too impressed by opulence, and gleaming surfaces. 1987's brightest; Ryuichi Sakamoto & David Byrne both contribute efforts that did powerfully little for their careers.