A Look Into the Mind of a Ruler

Rating: 9/10 (2 July 2000)

Many questions linger after this film.
In the some odd seventeen years leading up to his death, the former emperor Pu Yi is defeated and unloved, long gone from the money and servants that framed the life that he leads us through in his flashbacks. But had anything ever changed? Much of the film shows him quite defeated and unloved, trapped in perhaps the most exclusive prison in the world.
The director keeps in mind throughout this film that as he presents us the emperor, bit by bit, year by year, the audience must come to some opinion on how they view the man portrayed before them. Will he be a man loved, or despised? If no emotional attachment has been created, then the movie fails.
My own opinion seems to have been caught between loving and hating him. Yes, the early scenes in which the emperor explores the limitless power and beauty bestowed upon him with child-like innocence and wonder are touching, but as he becomes a man, so does his world begin to be seen through the darkness and immorality of an adult.
Never quite an "absolute ruler", the emperor's career seemed destined to fail by a world changing and advancing on its own far beyond his reach, both physically and symbolically. Should we feel love for him because he has failed? If Hitler had been unable to advance Nazi Germany to such imposing power in WWII, instead ending, let's say, as a lowly street sweeper, would not have film documentaries have crowned him the ingenious man that could have saved Germany from humiliation and poverty?
Surely, Pu Yi had all the markings of an evil tyrant: the intimidating intelligence, the arrogance to challenge anyone or thing that defies him, and ultimately the will to mold any situation into his favor.
There are many forces outside his grasp that shackle him, and inevitably he is indeed a failure, a joke. But that is not enough to make me love him. It is an error to love a man for his failures, but rather one should love him for that which he contributes to life. But what does Pu Yi contribute to his life? His is littered with the bodies of those that have come into contact with him, a morbid graveyard created from deaths that did not come from his hands, but from his ego and his power.
My inability to either love or hate him if anything makes him quite human. If he had been blatantly set up as an obvious protagonist or antagonist, the movie would have been flat, shallow. Humans are hard things to find in movies these days, and here is a rare opportunity to catch a sight of one. Kudos to Bertolucci for such an intelligent film.